64 Million Artists – The January Challenge

By Alex Nicholson-Evans, City Curator

I am currently in the thick of planning for Birmingham Light Festival, more on that very soon indeed, but today I wanted to share another project – 64 Million Artists, and their January Challenge.

We had such success with 100 Days of Creativity (you can have a read of the evaluation here) and I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how and when we bring back the 100 Days brand. I’ve also been thinking about how we can encourage people to engage with everyday creativity in other ways. So, when I connected with Jo, the CEO and founder of 64 million artists and learnt more about their January Challenge I was very excited to explore how we could give this more profile in Birmingham.

The January Challenge presents 31 unique ways to get creative, via daily prompts developed by a whole variety of creatives. I’m writing this on day 2 of the challenge, and to give you an example, yesterday the challenge was to choose your word of the year and write it down, or spell it out in a creative way. I happened to be on a beach yesterday so I spelt mine out in shells on the sand. Simple but effective and a very mindful pause in an otherwise busy day.

I love the idea of sharing this with more Brummies and getting more people in the city to take a moment out of their day to get creative. I have a vision forming of workshops taking place in cafes and cultural organisations across the city, of our build-to-rent sector championing this to their residents, and of offices encouraging their staff to get involved too. With not a huge amount of investment we can spread the word and empower others to champion this campaign.

To begin the journey I wanted to do a pilot and see if we could effectively engage people with the campaign on a slightly smaller scale before we took on a city wide mission.

I often think of the Jewellery Quarter as the ‘original creative quarter’ so the JQ felt like a natural fit for this and I’m thrilled to share that I have commissioned the Jewellery Quarter Development Trust and Quartermasters to deliver a pilot – engaging local people in the Jewellery Quarter with the 64 million artists campaign. It’s a very small project, funded by the UK government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, but it will give us a really great understanding of what it might look like to attempt to do this on a much bigger scale in 2026 and if we should even attempt that!

Quartermasters are going to be sharing prompts on social media, give them a follow here, and as we all gear up for 2025 they will be doing lots more to widen engagement including a series of in person workshops inspired by the 64 million artist prompts.

At the end of the month they’ll be evaluating and sharing their experience of delivering this project to help inform my thinking on what it could look like to work on this at a bigger scale in 2026. The fantastic folks at 64 million artists are also going to be helping us to understand what impact we made in terms of growing the number of people from Birmingham getting involved in the challenge.

If you fancy getting involved and giving The January Challenge a go yourself, sign up here.