BRADFORD’S Peace Museum is inviting families to get creative - using its 8,000-strong collection as inspiration.

The museum is using Bradford Council’s arts and cultural Covid Response funding - helping artists and venues to be creative during the pandemic - to launch a series of weekly challenges for children and families.

Following a public call-out, Bradford-born artist Nancy Haslam has been commissioned to work on the Peace Museum Creative Challenge, which invites youngsters to create a series of eight pieces of artwork inspired by the museum’s collection of more than 8,000 peace and protest objects.

The Peace Museum - the only accredited museum of its kind in the UK - explores the history and the often untold stories of peace, peacemakers, social reform and peace movements. Rooted in a collection of objects all relating to stories of peace, it occupies three small galleries in Bradford’s historic Piece Hall Yard.

The Peace Museum Creative Challenge, for children aged seven-plus, began this week and participants are urged to share their artwork with the hashtag #PMCreativeChallenge.

People of all ages are encouraged to get involved, and the museum says engaging with the collection could also benefit adults as a mindfulness exercise, during these testing times.

Says the museum: “Easy to complete at home, the weekly challenges contain things to do with stuff people may have lying around the house and don’t require you to have expensive art supplies.

“Building on the success of downloadable worksheets created by the museum during April, we hopes that this creative challenge will help us to better engage more local communities online as well as to continue to provide quality cultural experiences.”

Some of the artwork people share online will be featured in an upcoming online exhibition about the peace movement’s response to Covid-19.

Shannen Johnson, Learning and Engagement Officer at The Peace Museum says: “We’re really looking forward to launching The Peace Museum Creative Challenge.

“Hopefully it will provide some light relief in these strange times for the public, and improve mental wellbeing, as well as give people something fun to do with their kids.

“This is an interesting time for the museum as we look for new ways to support our audience and we’re really happy to be able to work with an artist to make our vision a reality, thanks to the Response grant scheme”.

Bradford Council’s grant scheme recognises that due to coronavirus, arts and culture has been and will continue to be affected as a sector, and will struggle to provide its usual cultural activities in the foreseeable future.

The funding is aimed at helping artists and the arts sector to flourish, and to create projects, solutions and new ways of helping and engaging with vulnerable people in communities across the district who may feel isolated.

Projects emerging so far from the council’s Covid Response fund include Through Our Lens, a remarkable online gallery of images taken by Bradford teenagers documenting their life in lockdown. The brainchild of Saltaire photographer Carolyn Mendelsohn, the project has had global praise, from renowned photographers and the New York Post.

Riddlesden photographer Simon Sugden has captured many of the district’s landmark buildings in his project Beauty in Decay, developed with Response funding. The images include old mills, hospitals and leisure buildings including Drummonds Mill, the Richard Dunn Sports Centre and Bradford’s former Odeon cinema.

* Follow The Peace Museum on Twitter @PeaceMuseumUK and Facebook peacemuseumbradford for updates. Post your artworks with the hashtag #PMCreativeChallenge.