[Music] this was the opening of current 39 Latoya M Hobs carving out time exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum a collection of five carved woodings and their prints the Baltimore based artist says she carves into wooden canvases to capture the small everyday moments that all humans can relate to but often take for granted I really like how you included your husband showing how he's involved with the children show how he's involved at dinner time with carving our time in particular the piece that's on display right now at the Milwaukee Art Museum I describe that work as a portrait of my day so giving you and uh look into my everyday life as a mother wife artist educator um and it really is to kind of give people a connection to this like everyday lived experiences that sometimes I feel like we take for granted uh this piece is a part of a larger series T titled salt of the earth and so I'm kind of personifying women as salt um primarily thinking about salt as a preserver so thinking about the role that we play and how we preserve our family our culture and community so really an opportunity to talk about my identity as a mother and what that looks like like in a day-to-day basis so next we have the fourth phase or the fourth scene of the day this is titled bedtime for the boys and yeah it's like like go time let's give these kids to bed um so this kind of repres also kind of represents our ritual as a family um so the boys are bigger so we don't actually like do this as much but we I would always do a bedtime story my husband would always do some type of like rough housing or playe with the kids so we kind of combine those things into like one um like one together I just feel like I just do what I'm called to do like some people do work that represents the struggle which we need that that's important um but that's really not like I don't know I just feel like that's not my assignment um so to speak and I feel like you need a balance you can't always engage in like the treacherous things that are happening in the world you need some type of balance or some type of break and repri from that and I also like really think about that in of like people who are activists and who are doing work in the community like sometimes they just need a break from that to tap into joy and I this idea of kind of like black joy and black resilience is also something that I'm really interested in right [Music] now it took some time to carve out time with each wood canvas requiring about three months of work this is a combination of what I like to call painting and print making so from a more traditional aspect uh you think about these pieces as like a wood block Matrix that's going to be used to create a set of prints or works on paper so the materials that I use obviously you need your Matrix or in this case it's a piece of cherry wood and so each of these scenes is made up of three individual pieces of 8x4 ft Cherry panels that are being put together to create the whole image um I normally start by painting those wood surfaces black just like a flat black paint then I do a really detailed drawing with a white water soluble pencil and then once the drawing is complete I use my wood carving tools or my wood carving gouges to literally carve away from the surface of the wood so if you he see here there's kind of two different textures there's like the lighter marks those represent like the wood that you would see underneath the paint so that's literally carved away into the surface and then the black represents like the top of the wood where you can see um the initial layer of paint and also the initial layer of ink once they're um rolled up to be printed the pieces were acquired by the Milwaukee Art Museum in December of 2023 and the museum is hopeful they will remain a part of the Museum's permanent collection I really wanted to acquire the works because they were the most incredible example of prints that I had ever seen so I first saw them in an exhibition in Minneapolis at the High Point Center for print making that tenia word curated and I saw the last SE of the series and I had never seen anything that large or that technically skilled where Latoya makes all these marks that really convey texture and tell the story so effectively I think that images like this will really expand who sees themselves represented in museums I really admire the fact that Latoya is presenting her everyday life so I hope that it resonates with people who come to the museum and they can see their own lives reflected back to them in this space I often describe my work as universal and specific so the spec specificity comes from the fact that I'm showing you um aspects of my life and the people that are around me but it's Universal in that a lot of the themes like anybody can relate to whether you're a parent mother white black I feel like the work like my blackness is not a barrier for you to be able to relate to my work [Music] the exhibit runs through January 5th 2025