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.
Back to the list
2014 Social Housing Arts Network
This 18 month partnership project was led by Manchester based artist collective Guild, with £89,000 from the Arts Council England’s Strategic Touring Fund and contributions from the four project partners: Bolton at Home, Poplar HARCA, South Yorkshire Housing Association and St Leger Homes.
SHAN Bolton Celebration Event from edwin pink tv on Vimeo.
It involved a variety of community food-growing and community cooking activities with refugee and asylum seeker adults and children. At the end of the project, the ‘Growing, Cooking, Sharing Box’ was created to provide a whole community resource that offers recipes, growing tips and stories gathered from those involved in the project. The Box has toured Breightmet Library, our Breightmet UCAN Centre and community events inside and outside Bolton.
For more information email Gaynor Cox or phone 01204 329706.