Carving Out Time is a monumental print series by LaToya M. Hobbs (b. 1983), a painter and printmaker based in Baltimore. This publication—the first of its kind on the artist—presents the series in full, with commentary on both Hobbs’s practice and broader themes pertinent to her work and to the field of contemporary printmaking.

Unfolding over five scenes, Hobbs’s towering woodcuts depict a day in her life with her husband and their two children. Hobbs extends the intimacy of her private life, centering the negotiations she brokers daily to balance her responsibilities as a wife, mother, educator, and artist—a contemplation of nuanced concepts of time and labor that is at once deeply personal and universal. The book serves as an art historical guide to Hobbs’s daily conversation with sculpture, paintings, and prints by visionary Black artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Elizabeth Catlett, and Kerry James Marshall living within this print series, depicted on the walls and bookshelves in the family home. 

Acquired by the Harvard Art Museums in 2022, the Carving Out Time series was exhibited for the first time in 2024 in the special exhibition LaToya M. Hobbs: It’s Time.

Elizabeth M. Rudy is the Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums.

With contributions by Leila Grothe, LaToya M. Hobbs, Kéla Jackson, Jovonna Jones, Nikki Otten, Nora M. Rosengarten, Rebecca VanDiver, Chassidy Winestock, and Mia Word. Foreword by Soyoung Lee and Elizabeth Siegel.