From a 1-Month Rebuild to 100% Automated Updates: How ArtPrize Runs a City-Wide Art Festival

• Headquarters: Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
• Technology Stack: Vercel, React/JS, BlockX, Cloudinary

Every fall, Grand Rapids, Michigan transforms into a sprawling city-wide gallery. For 16 days, ArtPrize brings together artists, venues, and hundreds of thousands of visitors for one of the largest independently organized art competitions in the United States.

Across parks, bridges, museums, storefronts, and public spaces, the festival unfolds in real time — and the website becomes the heartbeat of the entire experience. It guides visitors through the city, connects them with artists, powers public voting, and keeps the community updated as new events, awards, and milestones roll out each day.

To support an event of this scale, ArtPrize needed a digital platform as dynamic as the festival itself — fast to update, easy for staff to manage, and flexible enough to handle a high volume of real-time changes.

A static canvas in a live event world

Before moving to Storyblok, ArtPrize managed its website on platforms that weren’t designed to support the pace and complexity of a large, multi-venue, city-wide event. In 2023, the website was built on Azure, and in 2022, it operated on ArcGIS — a system that, while valuable for mapping, didn’t make as much sense for ArtPrize’s needs as a full event website.

The biggest challenge with Azure was the lack of a visual editor or admin interface, which meant ArtPrize’s staff — none of whom were developers — had no way to make updates themselves. Even simple text edits required assistance from external developers.

For an event like ArtPrize, where schedules shift, community events are added daily, and voting updates need to be published at specific times, the inability to update content quickly created significant operational friction.

ArtPrize needed a system that could keep up with the speed of the event.

A fast, fully custom rebuild for the 2023 event

ArtPrize needed to relaunch its entire website extremely quickly to prepare for the 2023 event. Their existing setup couldn’t support the pace or demands of a live festival, and time was already running short. Their development partner recommended Storyblok as a platform capable of handling both the rapid rebuild and the creative vision for the event.

ArtPrize’s Creative Director sketched the vision for the new site, and the developers were confident that Storyblok could deliver it. The result was a complete website revamp in barely a month, turning the earlier setup into a fully functional, custom-built site ready for the event.

Because the timeline was so tight, there was no opportunity for formal onboarding or training — but this turned out not to be a problem. After a quick walkthrough of the admin interface — how to log in, access blocks, and make content edits — the team was able to start working immediately thanks to Storyblok’s intuitive editing experience.

Crafting a city-wide festival in Storyblok

ArtPrize uses Storyblok as the core content platform for its public-facing website. Multiple teams collaborate inside the CMS, each contributing to different parts of the event experience:

• Project Management & Development. ArtPrize’s project manager works directly with developers to create new blocks and components, ensuring the site has the functionality needed as the event grows and changes. Because ArtPrize’s visual identity shifts each year, the team relies on Storyblok to support annual updates to the brand look and feel.
• Marketing & Communications. The marketing and comms teams use Storyblok for blog posts, updates, and general website content throughout the year and during the event.
• Creative Direction. The Creative Director uses Storyblok to make sure each year’s branding, color palette, and visual elements are reflected across all relevant pages.

Together, these teams use Storyblok’s front-end editing tools and modular components to keep the website updated and visually consistent.

While Storyblok powers the main website, ArtPrize depends on several external systems — all of which integrate seamlessly with Storyblok on the public-facing side.

• Artist & Venue Portal: the portal, built on Vercel, allows artists and venues to log in and submit information. After submissions are completed, that information is displayed publicly through Storyblok pages.
• Voting Web App: each artwork has a QR code that visitors can scan to cast a vote. The user flow is designed so visitors can:
  1. Scan the QR code to open the voting web app
  2. Navigate to a Storyblok-powered page with details about the artwork and artist
  3. Return seamlessly to the voting web app to cast their vote

This setup allows ArtPrize to maintain a seamless flow between its internal tools, public website, and voting process.

Results that moved the festival forward

Storyblok made a significant difference in how ArtPrize managed its 16-day event — both in terms of operational efficiency and measurable engagement.

One of the most important improvements was the ability to schedule and preload time-sensitive content. During the event’s “halftime” announcement, when the Top 100 vote-getters and community awards were revealed, the team could prepare all pages the night before and schedule them to go live automatically. This eliminated the stress of pushing updates manually during a moment when staff were physically moving between venues, coordinating logistics, and speaking with artists and sponsors.

This automation ensured the public always received accurate, timely information — even while the team was offline and handling the event on the ground.

ArtPrize also saw tangible engagement improvements. Using Storyblok’s banner component, the team could instantly highlight urgent updates, voting reminders, and paid event promotions at the top of the homepage. During the 2023 event, the banner promoting a ticketed experience generated over 400 clicks, contributing to two weekends selling out. The same banner format helped drive last-minute voting participation during the final days of the competition.

Together, these improvements show how Storyblok helped ArtPrize deliver a smoother digital experience, react faster during a complex live event, and achieve real engagement results.