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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2014 Johnson Fold World Cup Photography Project
This project began in 2006 when local photographer Adrian Barber took it upon himself to document the Johnson Fold estate during the World Cup of that year. Impressed with the resulting images, Bolton at Home commissioned Adrian to revisit the project in 2010, and again in 2014 under the title ‘Four Years On – A Community and Their World Cup'.
Adrian’s photographs capture a community united in celebration (and sometimes commiseration) in which community spirit and neighbourliness is still alive and kicking. The changing portraits of the individuals and families over the years have become deeply significant to the people involved and a source of collective pride for the community.
The project has produced four exhibitions, three books and numerous artworks installed in homes across Johnson Fold.