For Immediate Release – March 4, 2024
The Chazen Museum of Art and UW–Madison Art Department are pleased to announce the Chazen Museum of Art 2026 Russell and Paula Panczenko Master of Fine Arts Prize winner University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate Student Anne E. Stoner!
Awarded to one graduating MFA candidate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the annual Chazen Prize exhibition prize is offered in collaboration with the Art Department and judged by an outside visiting curator. Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum and arts administrator, and museum leader from Fort Worth, Texas, Tyler Blackwell (he/him), selected this year’s recipient. The 2026 prizewinner’s MFA thesis exhibition is presented by the Wisconsin Union Directorate Art Committee with the support of the Chazen Museum of Art, and the prizewinner receives a stipend to assist with their thesis production, provided by the Chazen Museum.
“To be a pedestrian is to be under suspicion.” —Rebecca Solnit
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?
Anne E. Stoner is an interdisciplinary artist and social ethnographer focusing in sonic practice. Her work brings about and coalesces studies in bodily complexities and disability studies, human geography, and psychogeographies, contemporary methodologies in ethnographic archiving and queer anthropology, new possibilities within technology, and studies within human movement and routine, to create a practice with an empathetic methodology that challenges visual standards within 21st century artmaking. Her work explores the manner by which bodies move through physical space. Particularly, she creates work about inhabiting a defective, invalid, immoral—ultimately “othered” body, in planned geographies. This body is a body which sounds in multiple regards, and capturing, showing, and archiving the sound and experience of this body is at the core of Stoner’s practice.
Stoner holds an undergraduate MA(h) from the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh College of Art and an MA from Northwestern University. In 2023 she began working toward an MFA in 4D Studio Art from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Stoner’s MFA thesis exhibition Infrastructure Bodies/Injury Systems will be shown at the Main Gallery, Second Floor, Memorial Union, 800 Langdon St, Madison, Wisconsin from April 10th to May 22nd, with the reception opening on Friday, April 10th, from 5 to 7:30pm, with Stoner’s Artist’s Talk from 5 to 6pm.