CAMBRIDGE — “Carving Out Time,” a 2020-21 series of five prints by LaToya M. Hobbs now on view at Harvard Art Museums, is a feat: woodblock prints of a scale that, if their two dimensions were three, you could step into them without so much as a stoop. The figures that populate them — Hobbs herself; her husband, the artist Ariston Jacks; and their children — are life-size, and the rooms of her Baltimore home actual scale. At 8 feet tall by 12 feet wide, the works obliterate the sad notion that art can be experienced on a palm-size screen. Scale and texture matter, a fact “Carving Out Time,” if you’ll pardon the pun, puts in high relief.
First, the feat: Woodblock prints are the oldest of the printmaking techniques, and maybe the most demanding; a literal transfer of ink smeared on a carefully incised wood surface, the act of printing itself is the least of its labors. Hobbs carefully inks each of her broad tableaux by hand and runs them through a press in three parts that she assembles into an all-but-seamless whole.
It’s a dizzying endeavor, impressive simply as a triumph of technical will. But the formal demands are counterweighted by a plainspoken sense of the everyday. Hobbs’s subject matter is neither conceptual nor heroic, but the quotidian substance of domestic life, itself a constant battle for balance and harmony. Hobbs’s work depicts a single day in her family life, read left to right: “Morning,” with the bedclothes rumpled by her two small sons as she and Jacks stretch and shake off the night’s sleep; “Homeschool and housework,” folding laundry and guiding lessons on Chromebooks (the prints were made during COVID school closures) amid the chaos of children’s toys.
Tellingly, I think, is the last of the five pieces: “The Studio,” showing Hobbs finally alone; it comes after a print depicting the children’s bedtime. “Carving Out Time” might be a pun on woodblock printmaking itself, but here, the reality of the title settles in: Only after all other needs are met does the artist have time for herself.
Intimate biography is certainly not new in art — pick any big name from Manet and Van Gogh to Bacon and Sherman. But Hobbs offers a closely observed view of the unromantic struggle to do everything in the inevitably messy environs of her family home. It’s at once relatable — who among us hasn’t felt the the scarcity of time for solitary pursuits? — and bluntly declarative: that art and life are inseparable, and any efforts to undo their entanglement is an illusion.
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Hobbs’s gaze in “The Studio” is penetrating, even more so if you watch the video the museums made to illustrate her process, which I recommend you do. Watching Hobbs nose-to-nose with herself, scoring the deep lines of her own face — the tracks of effort and exhaustion — requires a level of self-reflection few of us achieve.
But Hobbs zooms out as she zooms in: Throughout the series, in hallways and over the headboard, in the kitchen and stacked deep (of course) in the studio, are namechecks to her lineage as a Black contemporary artist. In “Dinner Time,” I instantly recognized her rendering of Kerry James Marshall’s “Untitled (Club Couple)” hanging over the table, its subjects’ carefree co*cktail sipping a stark contrast to Hobbs and Jacks serving the family meal.
Works by artists like Marshall, Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, and Valerie Maynard adorn their very normal day (the exhibition includes a QR code to help you ID them). They add a sparkle of the extraordinary to the scenes, a prompt to reconsider the mundane toll and circ*mstance of making art happen, and a declaration that art needn’t be so precious that it exists outside the everyday.
I also thought about the series as a monument to the work of Black artists more broadly, who have had to do that much more for that much longer to gain recognition. “Carving Out Time” as a title quietly celebrates tenacity, determination, will, passed along through generations. The series is a paean to the everyday travails of a many-pronged life lived all at once, especially when there’s no other choice.
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LATOYA M. HOBBS: IT’S TIME
Through July 21. Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge. 617-495-9400, www.harvardartmuseums.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
