Benefit Print Edition: Sonia Almeida

We're pleased to announce the sale of an exclusive six-color jigsaw woodblock print by artist Sónia Almeida. With only 25 numbered editions, this artwork represents our first benefit print edition where all proceeds will go toward sustaining Boston Art Review's future. Sónia Almeida's work can also be found in Issue 14: Half Full in a print-exclusive artist project.

Sónia Almeida, Asymmetries, 2025
Jigsaw woodcut printed in colors on Fabriano Rosaspina paper. 23 in. x 30 in. unframed, 24 ½ in. x 31 ½ in. framed. Signed and dated in pencil. 

Numbered edition of 25
Printed by Stone Hill Press, Woburn
Published for Boston Art Review by Caira Art Editions, Cambridge

• $1,950 unframed — Available for local pickup or shipping beginning May 15, 2025
• $2,450 framed — Please allow 3-4 weeks for custom framing by Stanhope Framers

Shipping costs are additional and will be determined based upon address at time of transit.

For questions or to pay by invoice / check, please contact jameson@bostonartreview.com. Otherwise, we will be in touch to coordinate pickup or dropoff logistics. 

About this project:
Sónia Almeida is thinking about what is kept on the margins, and what it might be like for the peripheral to become central. The elements that make up Asymmetries refer to the material and the digital world—sometimes both at once. 

For a composition made up of disparate elements—18th and 19th century fabric book samples, digital pixels, or architectural motifs—the jigsaw woodcut perfectly married medium to concept. Asymmetries is printed from eight distinct woodblocks, in six colors, via three runs through the press. The first layer required a careful registration of six individually inked woodblocks, fit together on the press bed like a jigsaw puzzle. The second and third layers, while single woodblocks only (one for the orange and one for the black) demanded no less precision. An accomplished printmaker, Almeida’s skill with the medium is seen in the variety of lines; note that any straight edges were manually cut alternately with and against the grain of the woodblock. As a whole, the image coalesces into a spiral, forming a path for the eye to travel from the edges inward, with occasional steps and skips. This is akin to how we receive and synthesize information in daily life. 

“Chatter” is a printmaking term for the unintentional remnants of the block that print in areas that should be blank. (In a woodcut, anything unprinted in the image must be cut away.) Almeida reveled in the “chatter” that contributed spontaneous static in an otherwise carefully planned image. With Asymmetries, she questions why we focus on the center when the borders can be just as interesting. The characteristics of her medium offer a visual reprise: in a thoroughly mapped out image, the incidental marks enliven the whole.