GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — ArtPrize, the annual, international art competition in Grand Rapids that coincides with the changing of the seasons, is back for another year of color and creativity.
From Thursday, September 18 to Saturday, October 4, more than 1,100 artists and their 900-plus entries will populate 155 venues throughout downtown, celebrating their craft and competing for thousands of dollars in prizes.
The top awards at ArtPrize 2025, the Public Grand Prize and the Juried Grand Prize, are both set at $100,000.
In addition, the winners of six public and six juried categories will each win $10,000.
In a repeat from last year's festival, five, $10,000 Visibility Awards will also be handed out to artists from underrepresented communities.
A $5,000 Venue Award will be presented to a venue that "displays thoughtful curation" and exemplifies the "spirit of ArtPrize" and thousands of more dollars will be awarded to artists in the form of grants, including one for a large-scale project on the Blue Bridge.
"We are not in the arts business, and we're not in the events business. We are in the customer service business," said ArtPrize Executive Director Catlin Whitington on Tuesday, presenting an overview of the festival to the Grand Rapids Committee of the Whole.
"We are there to support and provide service for all of our stakeholders, our community, our artists, our venues," he said.
In 2024, ArtPrize attracted around 795,000 visitors and generated an estimated $71 to $77 million of economic activity in the region.
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In 2025, around a hundred more artists and five fewer venues are participating in the festival.
"The artists come in from over there and the venues come in from over here and if it's done right, it works," Whitington said.
On Friday, September 19, an Opening Celebration will be held at Rosa Parks Circle, complete with fireworks and a pedestrian parade down Pearl Street and across the Blue Bridge.
During the festival, the Arborialis, a 9,000 square-foot, three-story art installation at 555 Monroe, will display Islamic architecture, Archimedean solids and Gothic cathedral design elements in an inflatable light and color exhibit.
A short walk away in the underground parking garage at SILVA, an art activation called BioPhilia will display curated works centered around biophilic design principles, a term that refers to the intrinsic connection between humans and other life forms in nature.
"We don't curate the art," Whitington said. "The artist bring us the work they want to show."
On Friday, October 3, the ArtPrize Awards Ceremony will be held in a movie theatre at Studio Park and broadcast live outdoors at Midtown.
"Every year, exploring ArtPrize allows the public, the visitors and us, to experience a whole new exhibition of work," Whitington said. "You're not going into the archives, you're not going into the permanent collection of a museum. You are finding a whole new experience."
