The Founders

*'GSD succeeded in its artistic aims but tended to falter philosophically because of a core weakness—it depended for its continued growth on the chance mix of individuals to create a living culture. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn't.'(p70)*

 **Figure 3.** Founders of Graphic Studio Dublin 1960.

Printmaking was also enjoying a resurgence in North America, in Britain, France, Russia and Scandinavia and many new print studios were being set up, often with the assistance of generous philanthropic donations. Hence GSD can be seen as part of a more widespread pattern on international development in fine-art printmaking. Many of the world's leading print studios were set up around this time. In the US: Pratt Contemporary Graphic Art Centre (1956), Tamarind Lithography Workshop (1960), Crown Point Press (1962) and Hollanders Workshop (1964). England saw the establishment of the Curwen Press (1958) and Scotland, Edinburgh Printmakers (1967). The seed funding of these various establishments tells its own story. In the US, big businesses were more established, and the germs of the concept destined to become corporate social responsibility were already visibly benefiting the arts. Pratt-Contemporaries received a donation of \$50,000 from the Rockefeller family, while Tamarind received \$135,000 from the Ford Motor Corporation. Figure 4 shows some of the printmaking techniques used in GSD.

**Figure 4.** A flavour of the work that takes place in the Graphic Studio Dublin.

However, raising money, especially for the Arts, in the cash-strapped Ireland of the 1960s, was a far trickier proposition. The Irish Export Board came forward with £120 and, while this was derisory when compared to US funding, in Ireland's low-wage and even lower-expectation economy, it was able to go a long way. However, one of the early successes of GSD was an imaginative business model they developed through which generous individual sponsors were encouraged to make a modest annual contribution in return for which they would receive as a gift a small portfolio of prints. This 'sponsors' portfolio' idea still persists to this day, some 50 years later. GSD became a thriving, successful, dynamic artistic community recognised by the Arts Council as part of the visual arts landscape in Ireland and recognised by artists as a commune where inexperienced and veteran printmakers; where master and pupil could work side by side.

Fast-forward, then, almost 50 years later. In 2007, experiencing growing pains and needing additional space to accommodate new equipment and to offer new, emerging printmaking techniques such as silk-screen, GSD now had its own CEO, its own Studio Director (a master-printmaker) and it had acquired its own gallery as a sales channel for artist members to both exhibit and sell their work. It decided to purchase new premises (see Figure 5) during the property boom in Ireland: a four-storey former granary close to the heart of the city on the northside of Dublin. To make the purchase, the organisation borrowed heavily. It had not owned premises before this one, it had been renting for the first 50 years, and the Board thought it was time to ge<sup>t</sup> a place they could consider home and call their own.

While the idea might have been laudable, the timing was catastrophic. It coincided with Ireland's first ever property 'bust', where property prices went into freefall, precipitating the deepest and longest recession in Ireland's history. The value of the property plummeted and the Board of GSD managed to negotiate a temporary 'interest only' paymen<sup>t</sup> arrangemen<sup>t</sup> on the property mortgage. However, the bank that owned the mortgage quickly sold it to a hard-nosed US vulture-fund who wanted to foreclose on the premises and to cast the artists out on the street. This would have left a generation of Irish printmakers without a place to work and without the facilities to make their art. The problems with the unsustainable mortgage were compounded by the fact that art purchases are among the first discretionary spends to ge<sup>t</sup> cut during a recession. People buy less art when their earnings are reduced, and hence, just when the organisation needed to show healthier revenues, its sales were drying up. This is where the VUCA environment loomed threateningly over the enterprise, with few reasons for optimism and every avenue for revenue generation apparently drying up.

**Figure 5.** The four-storey converted granary, new printmaking studio for GSD.

Innovation in cultural organisations is considered generally to fall into one of four broad typologies [60,61]:


However, sometimes, these conventional approaches to innovation are unlikely to deliver the sort of turnaround performance that was needed in this VUCA environment.

A new Board of directors was empanelled in GSD to take up this daunting challenge and this is where the Art Thinking strategy took root. To save costs, the services of the CEO were dispensed with. The Board has nine members, of which the majority (5) are artists and the rest are volunteers, generally those interested in Art from the professions. In this instance, there is a chairman, a director of marketing and strategy (the author), a head of Legal (a bank property lawyer), and a head of finance (a chartered accountant in a large practice). The challenge for the new board was to restore GSD's finances to the extent to which it could afford to service the full payments on a mortgage—a reduced mortgage from the one originally taken out. This meant not only getting the business back into a healthier shape, it also required that the mortgage be renegotiated with, ideally, some debt forgiveness.

The situation was so dire that the Board really had to embrace the principles of Art Thinking: it did not seem to them as if it would be enough to plot a route from current position A to an incrementally better position of A+. The Board just had to start with inventing a vision of what a desirable point B might look like in terms of revenues, audience numbers and costs. The Board decided to ge<sup>t</sup> all the artists on board to co-create a new, commercial strategy to pull the organisation back from the edge. Several artists (roughly 12) attended a Strategy Day in which a strategic North Star and set of guiding principles for the organisation were developed and several key effort priorities were agreed. The North Star was the organisation's guiding purpose and the effort priorities represented the key deliverables underpinning it. After that, the entire membership was invited to a brainstorming session which was run in a world-cafe format; roughly 40 members attended, which represented around 75% of members. The delegates were given a briefing on Art Thinking and given problem statements, such as: *wouldn't it be great if* ... *, or how might we* ... *?* Each table had to work through the effort priorities and give them some dimensions and sugges<sup>t</sup> revenue generating projects that, while being imaginative enough to be exciting needed to be capable of being actually implemented. The brainstorming session was professionally facilitated by a consultant.

Inviting artists into the business planning process was also an unconventional (and courageous) step as artists invariably have a strong vision and point of view and they rarely pander to an audience's tastes; rather they like to explore new territories and bring the audience on the journey with them. Nevertheless, this artist collaboration yielded a large amount of good and useable concepts, which the Board started to implement straight away. Many were grea<sup>t</sup> sales ideas. One prompted a themed artist-led and very profitable promotion called *100 by 100*, in which 100 members produced one piece (an etching or print) which had to be inspired by something in Ireland's National Botanical Gardens, and they each made 100 prints of it. This was themed *the Botanicals*, as Dublin's Botanical Gardens allowed the show to be exhibited there during their busy season, thus providing GSD not only with a new audience for original art but with a new exhibition venue.

Another initiative was the selection of a street graffiti artist (Dublin's equivalent of Banksy) to come and make a series of prints in GSD (see Figure 6). This was a groundbreaking partnership, the artist, Maser, was well known for urban street art, and was an iconic figure in the youth market with a cult following on social media. To ge<sup>t</sup> Maser to make a series of fine-art prints was quite a coup for the studio, and the prints he produced sold so well and so fast that they broke all prior records.

**Figure 6.** A sample fine art print by street artist Maser—leading to record sales in GSD.

Others were that some of the artists' larger works were showcased in pop-up retail stores in some of Dublin's busiest shopping thoroughfares, such as the Powerscourt Townhouse Shopping Centre. New markets, new spaces and new audiences were being opened up through this strategy, and the sales were really feeling a dramatic lift. In searching to open up new and larger markets for Irish printmaking, the sponsor's portfolio was revived, and sales were made to institutional buyers like Yale University, Oxford University and in Ireland to the National Gallery and Trinity College.

The organisation also strengthened its Business to Arts partnerships and forged a deal with one of Ireland's biggest law firms to produce an original piece of art to go to their 750 best clients. This was a high-ticket, prestigious and profitable programme, putting original art into the homes of hundreds of well-paid business executives. Figure 7 shows the classification and the range of innovation activity that was undertaken at this time for the organisation. A lot of the activity focused on bringing the work to the attention of new and different audiences, especially people to whom printmaking was relatively unknown. A counter-intuitive feature of this case is that when threatened with the harsh financial crisis, rather than drawing in their horns: cutting costs and commissioning less work, the Board chose to do the opposite. They elected to take a different approach, to ignore the bleak reality and, instead, to imagine a different and better reality for the organisation. They began with plotting a strategic 'north star' and navigated towards this desired outcome.

**Figure 7.** Classification of the Art Thinking projects developed and delivered by the Board.
