As laws in the U.S. governing the freedom of expression and the right to occupy space continue to change, artists increasingly anticipate the presence of police, surveillance technologies and the consequences of arrest. How has the anticipation of punitive encounters taken shape materially, somatically, and temporally in art? In what ways has the misrecognition of artists’ vulnerabilities to state-sanctioned violence contributed to the normalizing of carceral relations in art practice?  This presentation draws upon Black feminist and queer of color theories of spatialized power, critical disability studies, and health studies to assess how artists’ differing calculations of risk can be understood as a form of knowledge--punitive literacy--uniquely equipped to confront the carceral humanisms shaping contemporary art and American society today.

Faye Gleisser (she/her) is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Critical Theory at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. Gleisser is an interdisciplinary art historian and curator of 20th and 21st century art, specializing in performance art, theories of embodiment, and the gendered racial politics of canon formation. Her scholarship has appeared in Art Journal, October, Artforum, Journal of Visual Culture, Women & Performance, ASAP/J, Aperture, a number of exhibition catalogues, and is forthcoming in the Journal for Curatorial Studies. Her first book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023), analyzing the relationship of policing, state power, and guerrilla art practice in the United States, received the 2024 ASAP Book Prize and the Smithsonian's 2025 Charles C. Eldredge Book Prize. Gleisser is currently researching artists and curators whose work animates the nexus of hormonal management, socio-medical state surveillance, and the possibilities of somatic abolitionist art practices.