Creative Capital Grants $2.9M to 109 artists across all 50 states

Creative Capital has announced its 2026 awardees, awarding $2.9 million in grants to 109 artists living across all 50 states and U.S. territories.

The announcement introduces two tracks of support:

• The inaugural State of the Art Prize, a $10,000 unrestricted grant awarded to 53 individual artists, representing one artist in every state plus Guam, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.
• The 2026 Creative Capital Award, supporting 49 new works across disciplines including visual arts, film, dance, theater, music/jazz, literature, technology, multidisciplinary practices, and socially engaged forms.

Two types of support

The State of the Art Prize is positioned as broad, grassroots support: $10,000 that artists can use with flexibility, paired with the reach of Creative Capital’s national open call model.

The Creative Capital Award focuses on ambitious, original project proposals. Awardees receive up to $50,000 in unrestricted project funding, plus professional development services and community-building opportunities connected to the organization’s wider artist-support ecosystem.

For creative entrepreneurs, the difference matters. One award provides general runway. The other provides project runway plus structured support designed to move a new work from concept to completion with real resources behind it.

Scale, reach, and an expanded national footprint

Creative Capital says this is the first year it is supporting artists in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming—an expansion the organization frames as part of serving innovative artists nationwide amid urgent and widespread need for arts funding.

The awardees were selected from 4,546 applications through an external review process involving 107 industry leaders, programmers, cultural producers, and artists, followed by discipline-specific final panels.

What kinds of projects are being supported

Creative Capital frames the 2026 projects as formally ambitious and wide-ranging in subject matter, pointing to examples that include an Arabic-language jazz opera, a family-owned grocery store transformed into a community space in gentrifying Washington, D.C., and a film meditation on the color blue.

Across both award tracks, Creative Capital points to topics that span state violence, democracy, poverty, the fentanyl/opioid crisis, consumerism, autism, healthcare, labor, conservation, dementia, ageism, patriarchy, gentrification, religion, famine, and war, among other themes.

The good news for artists

In an environment where many artists juggle multiple income streams, the practical value of unrestricted support is straightforward: it gives creators room to make decisions that protect the work.

• buying time for focused making and revision
• paying collaborators fairly and earlier in the process
• covering production, travel, research, access needs, and documentation
• strengthening the project infrastructure that makes future opportunities easier to pursue

Creative Capital also points artists toward its broader support model, including the Creative Capital Artist Lab, which offers online professional development courses free of charge for individual artists.