Baltimore-based LaToya M. Hobbs works as a painter and printmaker. She explores representations of Black womanhood, identity, and artistic legacy through her arresting large-scale portraits. Using traditional woodcut printing techniques, Hobbs creates print matrices that capture the likenesses of her family and community. The artist often produces an edition of prints from the woodcut matrix and then presents the panels themselves as finished artworks, which she considers to be paintings. Operating from a place of deep empathy, Hobbs is keenly invested in forming a critical discourse around the power of Black women, sisterhood, spirituality, and motherhood—an aspect of artists’ lived experience that so often goes ignored and, even more often, asymmetrically burdens the careers of female artists.

Hobbs places utmost importance on representation—whom she includes in the narrative of her works and how—elevating familiar subjects and scenarios to monumental scale. She describes a core motivation to “present the everyday as triumphant.” The artist pays homage to the Black artists who have shaped art history and inspired her career, drawing from the works of Kerry James Marshall, Margaret Burroughs, Elizabeth Catlett, and Alma Thomas. Equally important to the artist’s practice are West African textile patterns, which often appear throughout Hobbs’ compositions.

She received her undergraduate degree in studio art with an emphasis in painting from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and her M.F.A. in printmaking from Purdue University. In addition to her own studio practice and raising her two children, Hobbs devotes her time to teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art and is a founding member of Black Women of Print, an artistic collective aimed at shining light on the work of Black women printmakers of the past, present, and future.