Carving Out Time

        I’m going to try to get to this exhibit in person, but in case that doesn’t happen, I’ll go ahead and share it today in case anyone else who reads this is in the area and able to see it at the Harvard Art Museums before it closes on July 21.  LaToya M. Hobbs made a series of five enormous woodcuts depicting a day in her life.  Each of the five panels is eight feet tall, so these are basically life-sized!  Not only are they life-sized, but they’re also life-like, depicting life in a way that simultaneously shows the realities and makes them monumental.  It looks like each of the five panels is actually made from three big blocks pieced together.

        Hobbs explores the fact that she’s not just an artist who gets to sit in her studio making art, but is also a wife and mother who has to balance the work, play, complications, and joys of being a fully rounded human being.  This is very clear in the title of the series: Carving Out Time.  It’s a little like my series “Busy Time,” “Story Time,” and “Bed Time,” although of course my pieces are very small and simple, while Hobbs’s pieces are a technical tour de force as well as a bravura masterpiece of art.

        The walls of Hobbs’s rooms show work by other artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Elizabeth Catlett, and Margaret Taylor Burroughs.  I don’t know whether Hobbs actually owns these works and has them hanging on her walls, or whether they are more metaphorical: the art that furnishes the interior rooms of her heart and mind.

        I’d really love to be able to get a close-up look at the carving and inking, which doesn’t show up very well on-line.  I’d also love to get the sense of size, which is impossible on a little screen.  If I do manage to get to the exhibit this weekend, I’ll report back!  But even if I don’t, I think it’s safe to say that I love everything about these pieces: their subject, their medium, their execution, their humor, and their aesthetic impact!

        (Update: I was able to see it in person, so you can see what I discovered at More Time for Hobbs.)

[Pictures: Carving Out Time, five woodcuts by LaToya M. Hobbs, 2020-21 (Images from Harvard Art Museums).]