Looking back at 2025

As we bring the year to a close and look forward to the festive season, we’re sharing some of the highlights from 2025.

We Are Wednesbury

We’re thrilled to say that our annual We Are Wednesbury Community Lantern Procession took place on Saturday 25 October, 2025 through the streets of Friar Park and Woods Estate in Wednesbury using Woods Methodist Church as our base and taking the celebration to people's doorsteps.

For the last three years, we have worked with local community groups and arts collective, Bostin’ Arts, to create a procession of hand-made lanterns and giant puppets to light up Wednesbury. For this fourth year, the theme was inspired by the town’s ancient history and the Viking roots of the town’s name: Wednesbury means ‘Woden’s Borough’ named after the Norse god Woden. Influenced by our Green Roots programme and our urban greening initiatives, the procession looked back to a time when Wednesbury was wooded and wild.

It was brilliant to see so many project participants and their families come out on a cold winter’s evening to carry their lanterns and walk alongside the giant puppets. As night fell, the glow from a hundred lanterns lit the streets with Ghost Caribou, Thingumajig Theatre’s giant illuminated creatures, leading the procession and live music from Head Rush Brass Band drawing families to their doorsteps and the streets to watch and cheer. Read more here.

Take a moment to watch the short film here created by Tegen Kimbley.

Green Roots Programme

Throughout this year, we have collaborated with a range of artists to facilitate projects, workshops and events with community groups as part of our long-term Green Roots programme.

Artist, writer and storyteller Polarbear (aka Steven Camden) worked with young people from Sandwell Council’s SHAPE Programme to build on workshops delivered in 2024. Together they looked at how storytelling, creative writing and visual art can be used to amplify the youth voice in the current climate conversation. The group worked with Polarbear to co-design an eco-zine, titled This is Real, to be used as an educational resource for tackling climate change at a local level for school students in Sandwell. We shared This is Real with young people who attended Sandwell Council’s annual SHAPE Youth Summer Festival on 12 July 2025, and with secondary schools across Sandwell that participate in the Eco-School Programme.

Over a series of workshops delivered during July 2025, artist Laura Onions worked with the Bangladeshi Women’s Association at Tipton Muslim Centre on This is your sun, a printmaking project that encourages a re-framing of our thinking towards the sun as an energy-giving entity. The group examined what energy means to them, making collaborative drawings that track their daily energy and how this can be connected to the sun. These drawings, alongside photographs taken by the group, were then used to create cyanotypes – a technique that uses sunlight to develop a printed image. The prints reflect the group’s exploration of energy and their feelings towards the climate landscape they have inherited.

We also collaborated with artist-chefs, Jo Capper and Jenni Capper, and a group of young people from Sandwell Youth Service on a series of cooking sessions at Malthouse Stables in Tipton. During June and July, the group explored the rich connection between food, creativity and sustainability, built their confidence in the kitchen, developed practical cooking skills and began thinking about where their food comes from.

In June, we celebrated the official opening of the Pocket Park on Bull Street in West Bromwich. Starting in September 2024, Ruby Lewis, from local arts collective Bostin’ Arts, worked closely with learners from Sandwell College’s Foundation Learning Department, hosting weekly design, drawing, poetry and planting workshops, culminating in the development of a pocket of wilderness in the urban bustle of West Bromwich town centre. The Pocket Park is filled with the creative endeavors of the learners and it has blossomed over the course of the academic year into a thriving communal space, full of wilderness, greenery and creative elements for everyone to enjoy.

Our Green Roots programme sets out to provide opportunities for our communities and residents in Sandwell to develop a greater engagement in, and knowledge about, the natural capacity of our surroundings. Our artist-led community projects have helped us to consider green spaces as havens within a post-industrial landscape; a space to play, to rest, to reflect, to preserve and create.

We are looking forward to continuing this thinking in next year’s Green Roots programme; to read more, click here.

Green Roots on the Meadow

On Saturday 16 August 2025, we hosted Green Roots on the Meadow, a celebration that was part of our Green Roots in West Bromwich programme. Taking place at the wildflower meadow behind Primark at New Square shopping centre, the day brought together art, music, theatre and hands-on activities, with a particular focus on connecting people to nature and to one another. This was the second year of bringing people together to celebrate the wildflower meadow that we planted with local volunteers back in September 2023, and to reflect on the importance of looking after our local green spaces.

The day was filled with creativity and performance, from screenprinting with Laura Onions and recycled creature-making with Polarbear, to painting miniature pollinators with Juneau Projects, alongside live opera from Birmingham Opera Company and Pif-Paf Theatre’s roaming Bee Cart.

As part of the celebration, we shared Pottery Pollinators, a new Multistory commission by Juneau Projects created with young people from West Brom’s YMCA and local community members. Led by artists Ben and Phil from Juneau Projects, participants created Pottery Pollinators across a series of workshops designed to inspire creativity and ecological awareness as well as build confidence through collaborative making. The end result was a trail of ceramic pollinating insects that ran through the meadow that visitors could follow, reflecting on the essential role pollinators play in sustaining both local ecosystems and wider food systems alike.

Bringing people together to make, learn and celebrate outdoors was a joyful reminder that caring for nature also means caring for our community and that small shared moments can inspire bigger change in our green spaces. Thank you to everyone who attended the celebration, and to those who helped make it possible.

Blast Creative Network

This year we supported 22 emerging artists based in Sandwell and the Black Country through our BCN artist development programme, through launching end of programme exhibitions and talks; initiating next year’s residencies; and art writing development sessions. Multistory’s programme takes place across a wide range of public spaces across the region and we want to thank our partners, The New Art Gallery Walsall and the Wolverhampton School of Art, for our ongoing collaboration and the wonderful resources they offer for the artists that Multistory commissions through the BCN.

Assembly

We have supported artists Mia Banks, Mandeep Dillon and Tegen Kimbley to make new work through Assembly, alongside our colleagues at The New Art Gallery Walsall. Their recently closed group exhibition Nothing Gold Can Stay ran between July and November, sharing new sculpture, moving image and photography.

The works considered the complex tensions between time, the production of images and the ethics of viewership, exploring how practices of slowness and deep attention ask us to view the world differently.

We look forward to sharing updates on next year’s programme in the new year.

Residencies

Our programme of residencies is held in partnership with the Wolverhampton School of Art and provides five artists based in Sandwell and the wider Black Country with support, advice, guidance and resources for development, research, testing out ideas and making new work. The 2024-25 artists in residence: Daya Bhatti, Satinder Parhar, Chantal Pitts, Molly Thompson and Courtenay Welcome shared the results of their residencies through an exhibition hosted by the Art School that ran between May and June, launched through an evening of artists talks.

We’re delighted to announce that the 2025-26 artists in residence are: Abraham Babajide Cole, Sylwia Ciszewska-Peciak, Sonia Levesque, Bag Lord and Rumbidzai Savanhu. You can read more about the artists here.

Rumbidizai Savanhu and Bag Lord are the first of this cohort to have already completed their three-week residency at Wolverhampton School of Art and they have produced fantastic work that you can seehere. We’re looking forward to seeing what the remaining artists produce during 2026.

The Printing Room

In September, we celebrated the launch of the second issue of our art writing journal The Printing Room, titled The Ground is Singing at the new independent venue .space in Wolverhampton, which features writing by Abigail Villarroel, Billy Haynes, Exodus Crooks, Laura Onions and Lorna Rose. The Printing Room provides commissions for local emerging artists to experiment with their writing and supports the publishing of new experimental and creative writing outside of traditional contexts. Thank you to everyone who attended the launch and a huge thank you to Cathy Wade for co-editing this issue and leading inspiring writing workshops for the writers.

The Ground is Singing explores the climate crisis through place and examines what climate resilience could look like in one of the UK's post industrial heartlands. In it, the artists consider: survival and kinship in spaces that we have made inhospitable; the timespan of the built environment and what will unravel it; what it is to fall into, and become part of, the ground; to create a therapeutic garden and to find common experience with the land. They present a new map of constellations that invite us to roam through the Black Country landscape from a new perspective.

You can buy Issues 1 and 2 of The Printing Room here on our online shop. The last day we’ll be posting online orders before the festive break is Tuesday 16 December, and you’ll need to order before 2 pm.

We welcome Dr. Sylvia Theuri as the guest mentor and co-editor for Issue 3 in 2026, which will explore the theme of ‘material’ including: artistic practices that allow the materials to lead; ways of making that embrace the tactile; the ephemeral, unruly ways of knowing; learning or thinking through making. We’re pleased to announce that the artists selected through this year’s open call are: Sarah Byrne, Marie Craig, Emily Scarrott, Larissa Shaw and Courtenay Welcome.

And more …

2025 saw a collaboration between Multistory, Sandwell Council and artist / designer, Mark Murphy, on a hoardings project that celebrates the people and town of Tipton. You can find the artwork on Albion Street and Union Street and read more about it here.

We also celebrated the news that Amak Mahmoodian has been shortlisted for the 2026 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, a long-term Multistory commission that was launched at Bristol Photo Festival in October 2024. Created in collaboration with 16 people displaced from their homelands, Amak’s work explores exile through dreams, weaving together photography, poetry, drawing and video. We’re incredibly proud to see this Multistory project recognised and we’re excited for its presentation at The Photographers’ Gallery in 2026.

A huge thank you to the artists, collaborators, partners and communities we’ve worked with over the past year and to our funders for their continued support.

To keep up to date with our programme and our work you can sign up to our newsletter here, visit our social media channels (Instagram / Facebook) and check out the news page on our website.

And finally …

We’re excited to be heading towards Multistory’s 20th anniversary in 2026, and we can’t wait to celebrate two decades of creativity!

Happy festivities everyone.