THE 2026 Panczenko MFA Prize exhibition will be on view at Main Gallery, Second Floor, Memorial Union, 800 Langdon St., Madison, Wisconsin. Gallery hours: building open–10 p.m. daily
RECEPTION
April 10, 2026
Artist’s Talk // 5–6 p.m.
Reception // 6–7:30 p.m.
Infrastructure Bodies/Injury Systems: An Exhibition by Anne E. Stoner
The 2026 Russell and Paula Panczenko MFA Prize exhibition is presented by the Wisconsin Union Directorate Art Committee with the support of the Chazen Museum of Art.
Artist Anne E. Stoner’s statement
“To be a pedestrian is to be under suspicion.” —Rebecca Solnit
Anne E. Stoner, photo Mark Kosobucki
Infrastructure Bodies/Injury Systems is a counter-surveillance that explores the contemporary state of the American street as cyclically disabling and criminalizing. Who is welcome in the street, and how must they move and present to be accepted as “orderly”? How are disablement, injury, and death intertwined with political resistance?
This project presents an assemblage of municipal surveillance videos, which I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act from cities in the Midwest. These videos capture an array of street moments from the last twelve months that document the American governmental climate. From these videos, I have developed a pixel-responsive sonic programming system, turning digital human movement into sound, coupled with voices from those injured in protests in the United States.
Infrastructure Bodies/Injury Systems responds to the American sociopolitical state, particularly the 2025 executive order, “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” The exhibition claims this order as a twenty-first century Ugly Law, a series of ordinances that criminalized unsightliness, loitering, and vagrancy in nineteenth-century American cities, particularly Chicago. The project criticizes new AI-powered surveillance systems—which listen for “dangerous” noises, visually track for disorder, and sort for bodily traits (skin color, gait, height)—as furthering the power of this contemporary Ugly Law.
How does a politicized human body sound within a governmental system, and how must we pay attention in order to hear it?
Juror Tyler Blackwell’s statement
Across her practice, Anne E. Stoner works with sound, surveillance, and collective voice to ask urgent questions about who is allowed to appear in public space—and under what conditions. Her work does not speculate about the future. It begins with what is already here: existing footage, existing technologies, existing lives shaped by systems that quietly watch, sort, and judge. Stoner’s commitment is to telling real stories, not inventing them, and to using the image of now as a way to bear witness.
At the heart of her practice is a belief in the power of sound. Where contemporary surveillance collapses bodies into patterns and probabilities, sound restores texture and humanity. Breath, vibration, rhythm, and hesitation carry emotional and political weight. They remind us that bodies are not abstractions, and that listening—truly listening—can be a form of care, resistance, and solidarity. In Stoner’s work, sound refuses efficiency. It lingers. It accumulates. It asks viewers to slow down and stay present.
Stoner’s projects are deeply informed by disability history and scholarship, particularly the long policing of bodies deemed disruptive or out of place in public. Drawing from Susan M. Schweik’s 2009 The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, her work connects past systems of exclusion to contemporary infrastructures of monitoring and control. Today’s AI-driven surveillance extends these histories, embedding old ideas about order and acceptability into new technologies that claim objectivity while producing harm.
Yet Stoner’s work is ultimately generous and affirming. By transforming surveillance footage into sound and amplifying the voices of those injured or disabled through protest, she reclaims tools often used to erase accountability. Layered voices form a collective presence—one that resists isolation and insists on shared experience. Her work reminds us that even in a hyper-monitored world, connection is still possible, and that listening carefully to one another can open space for dignity, care, and collective imagination.
About the juror:
Tyler Blackwell
Tyler Blackwell (he/him) is a curator, arts administrator, and museum leader from Fort Worth, Texas. He is currently the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum. Specializing in queer and historically underrepresented artist practices, post-1960s abstract painting and sculpture, and postcolonial strategies in video and photography, he has worked in university, civic, and encyclopedic art museums and kunsthalles.
From 2018 to 2022, he was the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum, a leading contemporary art institute on the campus of the University of Houston. Blackwell previously held positions at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, where he supported permanent collection acquisitions and the organization of wide-ranging exhibitions, commissions, programs, and performances. He was named a “2026 Curator to Watch” by the Observer.