Mackenzie Stoudt saves receipts.
Not for a fundraising activity, but for her art.
Mackenzie, 18, is the winner of 2025 Berks’ Best award in the visual arts category.
One of her sculptures on display at the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading depicts a cash register with a flowing ribbon of receipts encircling a cottony puff of illuminated smoke.
Her boss gave her the cash register and told her to figure out something to do with it.
“I did,” Mackenzie said while perched on a stool inside the art room of Kutztown High School, her next work in progress, a sculpted papier mache figure surrounded by taped-up soft drink cans, seated behind her.
“I was trying to make a commentary on the economy, and also just a lot of my projects focus on receipts and the idea that we spend so much money on sometimes useless things, but also very necessary things,” she said.
Mackenzie relates that to waste, the economy and the interconnectedness of it all.
“And receipts are a really good way to show this interconnectedness because receipts, you know, they are just what you’ve bought,” she said. “But it also can tell you a lot about the person. It can tell you, obviously, what they like to eat or if they have more money, less money.”
It’s also an object that people throw away or have stuffed in their wallets, she said.
“I have hundreds of them now, because I keep asking people, like, ‘Do you got any?’ And they’ll just pull some out,” she said.
Mackenzie also sees art not only as a function of the economy but also of politics, her membership in the Kutztown Banned Books Club attesting to that and her love of writing.
She plans on attending the University of Pittsburgh in the fall to major in writing and sees the interdependence not only of writing and art, but of art and politics.
“Everyone makes art depending on their political views,” Mackenzie said, “and a lot of art becomes political. You can go to basically any art museum and you’ll find something that’s highly political, and it might be strange, it might be weird, and definitely mine’s weird.”
Weirdness aside, Mackenzie also wants her art to be accessible.
“I want something that you can sit down with,” she said, “and just stare at and have a meal with.”
Mackenzie will save the receipt, too.
