What is Percent for Art?

Our Percent for Art team comprises two officers who are based in our Community Engagement Team and work across all areas of Bolton.  Our arts officers work with residents, community groups, partners and other community stakeholders to develop socially engaged arts projects that help to improve our communities and benefit customers.

We commission appropriate artists or arts organisations, to work with the local community, and we manage the project from start to finish.

The Percent for Art service actively encourages individuals and community groups to get involved in schemes that can offer creative solutions to neighbourhood issues.

Ideas for arts projects can come from our neighbourhood teams and they will focus on specific neighbourhood priorities or be developed through conversations with community groups, partner organisations or other community stakeholders.  Sometimes local arts projects are developed through wider Greater Manchester, regional or national networks or funding.

Our service also offers advice and guidance to our partners with regard to developing arts projects involving other social housing customers across Bolton.  We have also been commissioned by partners to project manage a number of community arts and public / environmental art projects in Bolton.

Projects can be in any medium including visual arts, performance, music, crafts, digital art and film. They can take the form of arts based consultation, skills and confidence building projects, arts in health & wellbeing work, festivals and celebratory arts, as well as streetscaping and environmental arts projects designed to enhance the physical environment.

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2008 Door to Door

2008 Door to Door

Housing Percent for Art commissioned artists Matt and Rob Vale to research and deliver a proposal for an exciting and innovative large scale art project that would engage our communities and capture the imagination.

Taking many weeks and a cast of hundreds of residents, Bolton’s biggest ever public artwork was created - Door to Door: a unique and innovative urban phenomenon; a light and soundscape animating and engaging with the architecture of Bolton town centre.  Each participant was filmed individually and the scenes were painstakingly woven together into a giant animated patchwork.

The animation was projected onto the grand façade of Le Mans Crescent over a week in November 2008.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03I3xWidrAY