Sónia Almeida: Margins of Error

Sónia Almeida: Margins of Error 

January 21–April 4, 2027  

Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Thursday, January 21, 2027

Sónia Almeida's practice resists easy definition, encompassing painting, sculpture, textiles, printmaking, and intricately bound artist books that move fluidly across mediums, testing historical boundaries. Her works often invite physical engagement: they can be moved, pulled open, unfolded, read, or otherwise activated, shifting the meaning and function of the painting or object through the viewer's encounter with it. Her work is materially rigorous and deeply intuitive, engaging questions of abstraction, embodiment, language, memory, and perception while remaining open to transformation.

The title Margins of Error enters this practice. Error is typically understood as something to be corrected: a deviation, a malfunction, a point where information fails. But in Almeida's work, the margin of error becomes generative. Where systems loosen, the hand interrupts the program, repetition yields variation, and apparent failure opens onto unexpected possibility.

This relationship between instruction and improvisation, precision and instability defines her work. Her engagement with digital processes and the Jacquard loom (both technologies structured through coding, translation, and repetition) creates particularly rich terrain for exploring these tensions. She works deliberately within these systems, attending carefully to their glitches and gaps, allowing uncertainty itself to become productive. This proposition has an urgency now. At a moment defined by systems promising optimization and control, Almeida's work makes room for what cannot be fully anticipated. It asks us to remain attentive to complication rather than rushing toward certainty, recognizing that difficulty and breakdown can produce new ways of seeing and making.

Margins of Error is a collaborative presentation across the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University and Wagner Gallery, part of Wagner Foundation. Curated across two distinct spaces and institutional contexts, the exhibition considers the breadth and complexity of Almeida's practice. On view at Wagner Gallery will be installation works alongside a selection of Almeida’s artist books. 

This exhibition is made possible by the Wagner Foundation and Girlfriend Fund, with additional support from the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA). Generous support for Carpenter Center programming is provided by the Friends of the Carpenter Center.

Sónia Almeida was born in Portugal and received her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London and her BFA from the University of Lisbon. She is the recipient of the 2025 Boston Artadia Award, the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2017 ICA Boston James and Audrey Foster Prize, and the 2015 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, among other honors. Her work has been the subject of recent exhibitions at the Clark Art Institute (2026–2028), Culturgest, Lisbon (2023); the Serralves Museum, Portugal (2024); and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany (2024). She is represented in the collections of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Fidelity, The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Culturgest, Lisbon, Coleção de Arte Contemporânea do Estado Português, and the Serralves Foundation. Almeida is a professor of fine arts at Brandeis University and works in Somerville, Massachusetts.