LET’S START A CREATIVITY REVOLUTION

Five years ago, just after Brexit, Darren Henley, the CEO of Arts Council England, visited Sunderland and called for a Creativity Revolution.

A few weeks later we visited the city and worked with a thousand children across four primary schools and created our #ILoveArt campaign idea:

Shortly after we were invited to Coventry for a talk by the then Culture Minister Jeremy Wright MP who launched the concept of a National Festival of Creativity.

In a private meeting later that day he told us the government were looking for projects that demonstrated the power of art and creativity to connect communities.

This inspired a five year journey for us, kicking off with our #ArtConnects19 Year.

This web page documents our work during 2019 supported by a project grant from Arts Council England.

ART FOR ALL

Our objective was to democratise art and at the heart of our work was the question ‘What’s Your Art?’ - a question we asked children, parents, carers and members of the community of a school in a socially challenged part of Bradford as shown in the film below.

Our Arts Council England project grant funded all the work we budgeted for as well as help us deliver additional projects within its scope to promote art in community and school community settings.

We had five key deliverables:

1: Delivery of a ‘#WHAT’S YOUR ART’ community creativity day

Initially we planned to do this in a London school but the opportunity arose in a challenged community in Bradford and we delivered this session there in July 2019

As shown in the film above, a showpiece of this day which included a talk and creative activities, was members of the school community including children, teachers, parents and carers creating #ILOVEART posters which we displayed and filmed in a human artwork, filmed by drone. 

2: Hosting of an #ART of COMMUNITY event in a school community

We followed up on the above event with this session just before Christmas 2019 in Bradford, with smaller events in Birmingham and Luton.

As well as running creative activities, we launched a crowdfunder to pay for a big screen in Bradford and had a community singalong to a Stormzy song.

3: A #WHAT’S YOUR ART presence at Camp Bestival

This was delivered in August 2019 and included a major stand area, main stage spot, speaker session and daily stage shows and involved a crew of over 30 artists and volunteers, connecting our message with over 15,000 people.

4: Development and delivery of an #ART OF CODING Event

We additonal funding support from Google, we delivered this in sessions in schools in Leeds, London and Liverpool. 

See this film of a particularly magical moment

5: Production of 5,000 #WHAT’S YOUR ART newspapers and online version

Due to covid we had to postpone print publication, only safely being able to deliver an online version which we are adding to to include work leading up to our #Ignite22 Year so this will be a work in progress.

6: Production/distribution of videos

As above we have made a number of videos as above which have had thousands of views 

The film below launched our #Collaborate20 Year and shows much of our work in 2019.

7: Additonal Pop-Up Events

We also did three pop-up #ArtofCarnival events during 2019

Notting Hill Pioneers

This one day festival runs a few weeks before the main carnival weekend and we were honoured to be invited to run this activity by Leslie Palmer OBE, one of the founders of Notting Hill Carnival.

We’re All Born Artists

2020 and 2021 were very difficult years for us with the pandemic but we were grateful to Arts Council England and DCMS for emergency funding with which we completely reengineered our community engagement model around live streaming from sets in an innovative green screen studio we built and used in our Collaborate20 and InspiraNation21 Years.

The short film below shows a number of live and live streamed community art events we ran on a cardboard Pyramid stage in Glastonbury and a cardboard Coventry Cathedral with communities across the UK.

Now… let’s #Ignite22 that #CreativityRevolution22