LaToya M. Hobbs: Sitting Pretty

LaToya M. Hobbs Sitting Pretty Rosenberg Gallery

Our hairstyles are highly communicative. At a glance, they engender inferences and judgements about individual and group identity that can have historical, cultural, and political implications.

Since the arrival of the first slave ships on American shores, women of African descent have responded to the constant pressure of trying to meet a white standard of beauty that is inauthentic and often unattainable for them by inventing their own measures of beauty.

Sitting Pretty exhibits fifteen large scale woodcut and mixed media monotype portraits by LaToya M. Hobbs that confront European expectations of beauty and hairstyle with boldness, rebellion, self-confidence, and a spiritual consciousness. Her work serves as a platform to deconstruct disparaging imagery of the black female body, and resurrects a visual commentary grounded in the expansive experience of black aesthetic expressions.

Hobbs’ primary medium of choice is relief printmaking.

For her, the act of cutting away from the wood or linoleum block to shape an image is analogous to the undertaking of black women who in response to critics from opposite camps—within and outside of the African American community—chip away at societal misrepresentations of black womanhood. With a series of decisively progressive carved lines and textures, her portraits create a wordless narrative between subject and viewer that reveal the beauty and grace of a self-proclaimed femininity.

—Curator, Sheena M. Morrison

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Shay-IV

Angelica,

Crystal Study 1

2011

2012

2013

woodcut

woodcut

monotype and collage on paper

44 ¾” x 28”

44 ¾” x 28”

31” x 22 ½”

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Kellie R. Portrait 2012 woodcut 44 ¾” x 28” 5.

Kimberly 2011 mixed media on paper 30” x 25”

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LaToya M. Hobbs: Sitting Pretty August 18 – October 25 ARTIST’S RECEPTION

Thursday, September 27, 6 - 9 p.m.

COVER: Kadari Study 1, 2013, monotype and collage on paper, 23 ¼” x 17” ABOVE: Double Portrait, Marci, 2012, woodcut, 45” x 60”

Rosenberg Gallery GALLERY HOURS

DIRECTIONS

9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Monday – Friday 410-337-6477

Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus.

The exhibit is free and open to the public.

The Rosenberg Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.

18350-6969 01/18

WWW.GOUCHER.EDU/ROSENBERG