Harvard Art Museums

The third scene from LaToya Hobbs’s “Carving Out Time” depicts the family about to sit down for dinner at their dining room table. Hobbs’s self-portrait is stilled in the process of carrying food to the table. One son washes his hands at the sink, while Hobbs’s partner Ariston Jacks pours water into a glass for their second child, who is already seated at the table. On the wall behind the dining room table, Kerry James Marshall’s (b. 1955) 2014 “Club Couple” is featured. Since the late 1970s, Marshall has crafted a painting practice centering Black figuration and aesthetics. Many of Marshall’s canvasses are immense and his figures are often life-sized (in her replication, Hobbs carefully cut each artwork to scale). In “Club Couple,” Marshall monumentalizes a young Black couple celebrating a night out on the town; their fingers entangle warmly as they lean in to embrace one another, all smiles as though posing for a photograph. The artwork’s inclusion is both a homage to Marshall—his large-scale woodcut prints inspired “Carving Out Time”—and a callback to the nascence of Hobbs and Jacks’s relationship. Marshall’s practice is concerned with love and the role the visual can plays in cultivating affection and care: “images,” he says, “teach us how to love things.”[1] In “Carving Out Time,” Hobbs enacts Marshall’s statement: she depicts love with love, trusting images to express the most intimate forms of interrelation. See “LaToya M. Hobbs: It’s Time” at the Harvard Art Museums through July 21, and follow this series to learn about the eight artists whose works Hobbs incorporated into “Carving Out Time”: Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, Margaret Burroughs, Kerry James Marshall, Valerie Maynard, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ariston Jacks, and Hobbs herself. ✍️ by Nora Rosengarten, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art and Architecture