2022: A Year In Review

2022 has been a busy year at Multistory. We continued to deliver our arts programme We Are Wednesbury, with community events, processions and exhibitions taking place on the street, shops and cafes around Market Place, launched a free podcasting course for our community audio project Sandwell Stories, took part in the Birmingham 2022 Festival, and partnered with lots of brilliant artists, creatives and community groups. A new round of bursaries for local artists was launched in partnership with The Wolverhampton School of Art for our artist development programme Blast Creative Network and we also worked with designers Mark Murphy and Jacob Masters to redesign our website, and identity. We were delighted to hear that we have received continued investment from the Arts Council England’s 2023-26 National Portfolio Programme, along with a funding uplift that will allow us to increase the reach and depth of our work and invest more resources into the Blast Creative Network.

Have a read below for our reflections on the year. Wishing you all a wonderful winter break, and happy new year!

We Are Wednesbury

This year's We are Wednesbury programme was full of exciting projects, public art commissions and events. We had an amazing turn out for the We Are Wednesbury Lantern Procession, our last event of the year. Over 100 people brought their community spirit joining in the parade with their lanterns walking along Market Place and Union Street in Wednesbury to light up the town as part of the Christmas light switch on. Some designed their lanterns individually, others in larger groups, as part of workshops ran by Sam Hale, Karl Lewis and their team.

We were joined by The Place of Welcome Craft Group, Friar Park Youth Club, Wednesbury Museum Community Art Group, 617 Sandwell Air Scouts, The Way to Wellbeing group, The Crafternoon Group, The Knights of Wednesbury, Wednesbury Rainbows, Guides and Brownies, The Wednesbury Police and Ideal for All and lots of support from our stewards. This was a truly magical and fun evening.

Artist duo Hipkiss & Graney ran workshops with Wednesbury residents, to create MARKET, a new public artwork for Market Place; a stall covered in fabrics that were hand painted by participants with stories of the town and their relationship to it. The market stall was made in replica of the stalls that stood in the old Market Place in the 1900s, with the frame built out of old timber and reconstructed through reference to photographs and paintings. Further workshops were held on the street at a celebratory event for the community.

We collaborated with TekkinPixon Wednesbury Through the Lens, a competition for the town to submit their favourite photos of Wednesbury. The winners had their photos displayed on the High Street and at Wednesbury Museum and Art Gallery. Read more here.

We also worked with groups at Barlow Road Gardens, an initiative run by Ideal for All. Participants collaborated with Real Arts Workshops (Alex and Gary) to explore the fascinating history of the gardens by creating a series of bright and bold inter-connected bark wood panels. Artists Vik Chandla and Shaun Hill invited participants to come together as hunter-gatherers to explore the garden in new ways and empower each other to play with collaborative poetry and story. Both groups met together for a celebratory event to showcase their work, play some games and eat some food together.

This year there was a strong focus on literature and poetry; we partnered with the wonderful team at Wednesbury library who produced a literature festival with exciting talks from incredible authors, storytelling events, and theatre that celebrated the history of the town and brought new stories and perspectives too. Black Country Touring produced What’s In Store; two days of exciting live poetry and theatre performances in independent shops and market stalls in Wednesbury Town Centre to celebrate Wednesbury’s community and the independent businesses at the heart of it. We also led a series of guided walks around Wednesbury, with performances and readings by local historians, poets and writers programmed along the way by Emma Purshouse, and Brendan Hawthorne staged performances in local cafes and eateries for A Street Full of Dialect.

The first cohort of Citizen Journalists wrote features on the independent bookshop Blue Sheep Books for the annually published We Are Wednesbury magazine. In October 2022 we began our second year of Citizen Journalists with six incredible young writers. They are currently working on innovative and compelling creative and journalistic pieces about Wednesbury highstreet, and have been to sweet shops, a bicycle shop, the museum, the library, and even had a fantastic chat with the newly opened ‘Mona’s Cafe’. The next issue of the We Are Wednesbury magazine will be available in print along Wednesbury High Street from April 2023, as well as a PDF to download on our website.

Arts Programme

This year we took part in the Birmingham 2022 festival, supporting artist Jaskirt Boora to produce her project People, Place and Sportand partnering with GRAIN to increase community engagement with GENERATIONS by Julian Germain. It was great to work with Jaskirt as she passionately explored the role of gender and ethnicity in sport, developing a series of photographic portraits and recorded conversations about what sports means to those in the community. People, Place and Sport celebrated these local communities and grassroots sports in the West Midlands. Jaskirt’s work was exhibited as an outdoor exhibition in two parts, a community exhibition at eight local sites across Birmingham and Sandwell as well as a large-scale outdoor exhibition at Sandwell Valley Country Park.

Earlier this year artist Amak Mahmoodian led a workshop with participants from Brushstrokes to explore dreams though painting, drawing and photography. The workshop was held as part of Amak’s new commission, Dreams, which explores the effects of exile and distance on memory, dreams and daily life. It was great to meet lots of new people and share stories and dreams together. We’ll be sharing more about this project next year.

We began working with artist Sophie Huckfield on a new Historic England funded project that will tell the stories of women who worked at the Kenrick & Jeffersons print works and free press, through a new pamphlet and exhibition that will be coproduced with participants next year. Sophie started meeting with some of the amazing women who worked at K&Js, and also began research at the Sandwell Community History and Archives Service with the help of the brilliant Mike Fenton, who is a local independent researcher and Web Administrator of the West Bromwich Local History Society.

We hosted our last event with Ali Baskerville as part of the project By Us, For You in January. It was a reading group where Ali took us through the guide and facilitated a conversation around what it means to be safe as a woman or non-binary person, and what tools and support systems we can put in place to look after each other. Check out the free downloadable guide here if you haven’t already.

This year we launched the second round of bursaries for local artists, as part of our artist development programme Blast Creative Network. The artists selected are Alex Billingham, Japhet Dinganga, Marley Starskey Butler, Polly Brant and Hannah Rollason. They have each have been developing their work and research through residencies at The Wolverhampton School of Art, and will be sharing back from their bursary in the new year. As part of the event programme we also launched a co-enquiry into the role of art in changing how we relate to the natural world, with a talk by artists Jessica El Mal and Zsofia Szonja Illes exploring the connection between social practice and the forming of more-than-human communities, and a multi-sensory workshop at Dartmouth Park led by artist Rachel Pimm which reflected on local environmental conditions.

In November 2022 we commenced our fourth year of Sandwell Stories! Next year our Spotify series will be around the theme of “green”, informed by our new cultural programme Green Roots, with episodes created by our talented community course participants. Local residents will each produce a short audio piece exploring the environmental concerns in the area and how they relate to the communities that live there. They have just completed their third session with the brilliant Marley Starskey Butler, who taught them all about recording audio.

Our Team

Time has flown by since Shaiden Williams joined the Multistory team as our Social Media & Marketing Co-ordinator back in February. Shaiden got her degree in Media and Communications from Birmingham City University in 2020, and is now studying part-time for a Masters that specialises in digital marketing that she will complete in September, 2023. This is the first time we’ve had a post dedicated to ‘comms’ in its many forms and it’s been great to develop the role with Shaiden.

After advertising for new Board members in January, we’ve since welcomed four new Board members and we now have 13 trustees with a valuable, and complementary, mix of knowledge, skills and specialisms who are a great support to staff and the work we produce. We're delighted to welcome Rupy Sandhu, Tom Spurgin , Eleanor Cook & Bhulla Begall as trustees!

2023

2023 also brings an exciting new programme Green Roots, that is part of the wider West Bromwich Urban Greening Scheme that Sandwell Council is delivering. The Scheme will focus on green public realm improvements that will animate the town with new green spaces that Green Roots will enhance through its programme of co-produced community and artist-led activities. We’re currently offering two opportunities for creatives, to find out more by visiting Opportunities.