WVU School of Art and Design alumna Ali Printz was one of 53 creators to receive a $10,000 unrestricted grant as part of the inaugural 2026 State of the Art Prize from Creative Capital.
A West Virginia native, Printz received dual degrees from WVU in Art History and Painting. She earned her Master of Arts in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in the United Kingdom and received her PhD from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.
Throughout her career, she’s held a variety of fellowships and artist residencies, including as a Tyson Scholar at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow with the Library Company of Philadelphia and Historical Society of Pennsylvania. She currently lives in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and commutes to work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where she is the Luce Foundation Curatorial Fellow.
Creative Capital is a nonprofit organization dedicated to championing artistic freedom by supporting artists across the United States. Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has awarded $55 million in grants and services to over 1,100 artists throughout the country. The yearly Creative Capital Award gives selected artists up to $50,000 in unrestricted project funding.
For its 2026 award, Creative Capital introduced the State of the Art Prize, which gave a $10,000 grant to one artist in each of the 50 states, as well as Guam, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.
“Creative Capital remains unwavering in our mission to support individual artists creating new work as a powerful catalyst for freedom of thought and freedom of expression in our democracy. In this moment of urgent and widespread need for arts funding, generous supporters have helped Creative Capital expand our open call, national grant program to serve innovative artists in all 50 states. This will be the first year Creative Capital is supporting artists in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming,” said Creative Capital President and Executive Director Christine Kuan.
Sang Digger (A.P. Russel, 1929, Buckhannon, WV), 2025, oil, fabric and clay on canvas, 40" x 40"
Where it started
Printz studied at WVU from 2003 to 2009, starting as a veterinary science major before switching to pursue art in the School of Art and Design.
“Art was always my thing, but I was trying to be practical,” Printz said. “I really love animals, but I realized I am really bad at chemistry and math. I was doing art and taking art and art history classes anyway, so I finally changed my major.”
The Art History department in particular was supportive of her switch—and her choice to double major with Painting.
“[WVU Art History faculty] Janet Snyder, Rhonda Reymond, Kristina Olson, Bob Bridges—all of them were mentors to me,” she said. “They saw the way I wanted to combine making art and doing art history, and they took me under their wings.”
Printz said that on the studio side, printmaking professor Joe Lupo was one of her biggest cheerleaders even though she was only a printmaking minor.
“West Virginia University was very supportive and let me do what I love to do, and let me mix things together,” said Printz.
“We’re just thrilled for Ali,” said Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Professions Rhonda Reymond. “Ali is tenacious, hardworking, smart and talented, and she deserves this award. In Ali, we see how her research background informs her artwork and how her background as an artist lets her bring a different understanding to the work she studies. We’re excited to see what she’s going to do with her State of the Art prize.”
Reymond taught Printz’s Art History capstone class, and in the years since Printz’s graduation, there have been a number of Art History dual majors.
“We want our students to succeed and explore what they’re interested in,” Reymond said. “We’ve had a number of studio majors like Ali, but we’ve also had students from anthropology and other areas. An Art History degree teaches you how to think critically and creatively, to communicate in writing and orally and to look at the world around you and ask deeper questions, and that’s good preparation for a lot of different fields.”
Since the Art History department is small, many of the instructors stay in touch with former students, keeping track of their accomplishments and helping make connections between current students and alumni. Printz is one of several successful graduates the program has on metaphorical speed dial.
“Ali's a wonderful resource for our current students because they can get a sense of where they can go and what's possible if you really work hard,” said Reymond. “It’s wonderful that we have informal ways for students to be mentored, or we can set them up through Creative Consultants to have conversations with alumni who can tell them what the day-to-day of a chosen career path looks like. People like Ali can help students figure out if a certain course of study really matches up with where a student wants to go in life or help them determine if a different direction would work better.”
Printz has been happy to be a resource for students who want to pursue both the creation and study of art. Over the years, several of her mentees have turned into peers and good friends. One mentee-turned-friend—Griffin Nordstrom, an Art History and Sculpture double major—will be showing his work alongside hers in the alumni exhibition “Reflecting on Freedom: 250 Years Through the Eyes of WVU Alumni Artists” at the WVU Downtown Library, which runs August 2026 to May 2027.
Reymond is excited to see what Printz does next.
“Ali’s going to take this award and run with it,” said Reymond. “She’ll do something really fantastic, and we look forward to seeing what she produces.”
“West Virginia University was very supportive and let me do what I love to do ...” Ali Printz
How it’s going
“I wasn’t expecting to get the State of the Art prize, but I’m happy I got it. It’s obviously an honor to have any funding from Creative Capital,” she said.
Printz has applied for the Creative Capital Award four times since 2020 with fellow WVU alumnus Ernie Roby-Tomić, who now lives and works in Norway. Together, they operate under the name of CrikHoller.
They’ve repeatedly pitched a community-based land art project for Mammoth Preserve, a reclaimed mine site now owned by the West Virginia Land Trust. Each year, CrickHoller’s proposal has made it further and further, and it was shortlisted for the 2025 Creative Capital awards. She was convinced this was the year they would get funded.
“I saw when we applied that the State of the Art was a possible option, but I was eye-on-the-prize. We were going to get that big, $50,000 grant and actually get this project off the ground,” she said.
Instead, Printz was awarded a State of the Art grant for $10,000. As part of their collective application, Printz and Roby-Tomić also included examples of their individual works that resonated with the collaborative project. Since Roby-Tomić does not currently live in the U.S., he could not be considered for the state-based awards.
While there may be some lingering disappointment that CrikHoller didn’t receive a Capital Creative Award, Printz is no less grateful or excited her for individual prize.
“I’ve been grinding for a very long time. It's awesome to have some funding to do things, because as I get older, and the bodies of work that I work on become more elaborate, I need more funding to do things.”
Almost Heaven, 2024, oil, enamel, anthracite coal and flannel on canvas, 48" x 50"
What comes next
In the past, Printz has self-funded her work or had small grants. She’s never had an unrestricted grant before, and she already has a wish list of art supplies she wants. At the top of that list are a 3D printer so she no longer has to outsource that work and commissioning wooden altarpieces for her next project: an eight-piece series about the robber barons who exploited Appalachia.
“I didn’t always pursue Appalachian art or make ‘Appalachian art’ as an artist, but I had this come-to-Jesus moment while I was living in New York City, right before I started my PhD,” she said. “Why is Appalachia denigrated? Why do people look down on it?”
Since Printz is also an art historian and a curator, she’s all too aware of how Appalachian art is perceived by collectors and scholars outside the mountainous region.
“Appalachian art is looked at as crafts or folk art and not as being aligned with modernism or any of these amazing American art movements. If you ask someone from outside of Appalachia what Appalachian art is, they think of baskets or quilts, or a janitor drawing in his spare time, but Appalachian art is also fine art,” she said.
Printz offered the examples of Blanche Lazzell, a fellow WVU alumna, who was one of the early pioneers of modern abstraction and whose work wasn’t widely recognized in her time, and of Andy Warhol, whose Appalachian heritage is largely ignored but whose silkscreened soup cans reflect his working-class upbringing.
Much of Printz’s recent work has to do with extraction—not just the extraction of minerals and other natural resources, but the removal and replacement of real Appalachian culture by stereotypes. When a group of people are made to look dumb, violent or antiquated—uncultured, so to speak—then there is little outside sympathy when they’re being exploited, Printz observed.
“That led me to the robber barons, who essentially built America on the backs of Appalachian labor,” Printz said. “They would not have been able to go into these areas and take what they wanted unless they ‘othered’ the people they wanted to take these resources from.”
For this project, she wants to create portraits of eight historic robber barons as part of, or accompanied by, a traditional three-paneled altarpiece (also called a triptych) that would tell the story of how he had exploited and harmed Appalachian communities.
She acknowledges, though, that this particular project faces two challenges. In an ideal world, she would display her triptychs in the very institutions built by and named for the robber barons she’s critiquing. That’s easier said than done when the work itself criticizes some of the biggest financiers of the 20th and 21st century art world.
The other challenge is one that many Appalachian artists face.
“Appalachian artists usually only have access to a regional stage, so they don’t get to tell their own stories on the national stage very often,” she continued. “There are artists from nowhere near Appalachia, and they go into a community, make a body of work about that community, then they get a show in a big museum to tell that story. And they get funding for it. But if an Appalachian artist tries to tell that story themselves, they are not given the same visibility.”
Her “No. 1 Bucket List goal” is to curate a blockbuster show by regional artists that tells Appalachia’s story historically and to have it on display at the Smithsonian or the Metropolitan Museum. In the meantime, she will continue to champion new artists and contemporary Appalachian art.
The Creative Capital State of the Art prize helps get her one step further on her journey to creating and curating artwork that she hopes will remind the nation that Appalachia is an integral part of the American story and that Appalachian voices are needed to help tell it.
Learn more about Ali Printz on her website aliprintz.com and about the WVU School of Art and Design at artanddesign.wvu.edu.