A one-day festival championing art and creativity is set to take place in Manchester City Centre this summer. On Saturday, June 18, Art Fund will host Art Assembly 2022 - City as Art School, alongside a collective of Manchester's leading arts organisations.
The festival will showcase newly co-commissioned and co-created artworks and installations across the city. Art Fund - the national fundraising charity for art - has organised the event alongside some of Manchester's biggest art institutions including Castlefield Gallery, HOME, Manchester Art Gallery, The Whitworth and The Manchester College.
Eight new artworks by ten Greater Manchester artists will be dotted around the city for people to visit, illustrating how busy squares, streets, pavements and billboards all have the potential to become a place of creative learning. These works span a wide range of media, from film and painting, to textiles, performance and music.
Manchester Art Gallery will be the festival hub, hosting many of the new works including Respawn by artist Olivia Glasser, a piece which features videos of pupils from Plymouth Grove Primary School re-enacting actions that are important to them in childhood. Art and Design students from The Manchester College will work with painter and animator Parham Ghalamdar to produce large-scale paintings on canvas as well as AI-generated animations and projections, inspired by the city's art scene.
Elsewhere, participatory artist and poet Maya Chowdhry is working with students at Manchester School of Art to explore 'space as a gift' with pop-up installations inside the art gallery and in St Peter's Square. Meanwhile, students from The Manchester College and artists Anna FC Smith and Helen Mather will collaborate to create stencilled botanical designs inspired by 18th and 19th century working-class botanist societies.
Addressing a number of pressing issues of the day, poster designs exploring climate emergency, created by students from Abraham Moss Community School with artist Sam Owen Hall, will feature between the school and the city centre. While, Sally Gilford's commission with the University of Salford's School of Art, Media & Creative Technology students will use the starting point of the bobbin - linked to the area's previous life in textile production - to tackle and address women's issues past and present.
A series of online workshops with artist David Blandy and young artists from the Venture Arts' studio has led them to reimagine Manchester 8000 years from now. For Art Assembly, they will be transforming their work into an immersive installation at Manchester Art Gallery.
There will also be a series of film testimonies by pupils at eight Manchester schools, about how and why all arts disciplines are valued within the curriculum. The films will be shown throughout the day on screens at Manchester Art Gallery.
Finally, there will also be a live recording of Art Fund's Meet Me at The Museum podcast in front of an audience at HOME. The podcast first launched in 2018 and offers insights into the cultural offer across the country.
As part of the one-day event, Art Fund has committed a £10,000 Student Opportunities grant to fund four new paid opportunities for young people in the Student Art Pass network to work as Art Assembly Coordinators. These four roles will support the marketing, production, front of house and evaluation of the festival.
Art Assembly 2022 takes place during the Our Year initiative, which celebrates Manchester's children and young people with city-wide approach to help them shape a safe, happy and healthy future. It is intended to be a year of action to create more opportunities, experience and support in the arts and culture sector.
Art Assembly 2022 is funded by Art Fund, Arts Council England, Manchester City Council, The University of Manchester and The Granada Foundation. You can book tickets for the events and podcast here.
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