E-Mail Us

Summer Quarter Essay — May 2007

On the Move...Again
by Andrew Rush   ©2007

The Drawing Studio is proud to announce its upcoming move to the former Johnny Gibson Gym Equipment Co. on 6th Avenue (between Broadway and Congress) in the heart of downtown Tucson and the arts district. The new building will almost triple the Studio’s current space on 4th Avenue. Plans call for the building to be renovated over the summer, opening in mid-September for the fall schedule.  

From the TDS Press Release 4/12/07
Full text found here.

This special summer newsletter about ‘The Move’ is dedicated to all 3800 of you who receive this newsletter every three months. I consider every one of you, simply for having signed up to receive the newsletter, the people who make up our foundation of interest that gives us our existence. Your support, whether passive or active, is what gets me out of bed each day to give direction to The Drawing Studio. You, personally, are why we are growing and changing, and so I want to always keep you closely informed and included in the decisions we are taking about our future.

So about this (capital letter) MOVE: for starters, I hate moving. My wife Ann and I have lived in our present home at Rancho Linda Vista in Oracle for over 31 years, so needless to say I don’t qualify as an easy get-up-and-move leader. When we moved TDS to 4th Avenue six years ago, I just
assumed that we were set for a long time, ready for a pleasant rise in enrollments accompanied by the satisfying glow of a job well done. But like the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the flow of people just kept coming without letup. The need for more space, more courses, more faculty, and more help in the of office began to get critical. By 2006 our Board could no longer avoid facing the simple truth that arises in many successful organizations like ours called ‘Grow or Die.’

If you are currently active in our programs, you already know how we have slowly come to understand and respond to the remarkable tidal wave of interested people entering our studio arts programs. (I have written several essays on the matter in this newsletter. To read more of Andy's essays click here.) At the same time, central to the concept and mission of The Drawing Studio is having an adequate and prepared physical center in which to meet, learn, and practice together. Therefore, about a year ago the Board of TDS began casting about for a larger space that we could afford.

We quickly found ourselves in a deeper process about ourselves. What we began to realize was that leasing a new and larger home (our third move in 14 years) was only one component of a pivotal moment in our growth cycle. The real ‘Move’ needed to happen in ourselves and our thinking—sometimes called “Crisis as Opportunity.” Many larger questions arose: Move to where exactly? Are we a stand-alone kind of enterprise that could relocate anywhere? Or do we best realize our mission to serve the whole community by locating the core of TDS in the cultural center of Tucson life? And if the latter, where is that center exactly? If there isn’t a clear center, where is it logical to place ourselves?

Through the fall of 2006 we looked at properties, debated, doubted, studied, pondered. I can’t speak for the whole Board in those rst talks, but my impression was that we mostly put a cheerful looking face on the ‘opportunity,’ but underneath there certainly were some real concerns about over-extending our capabilities— nancial, operational, all that was comfortable and known for all of us. For me, down inside, I was feeling old and tired, not because I lost confidence in the power of what we are doing, but because I felt trapped in an obligation to mount and lead my friends on yet another big Don Quijote adventure of expansion, one that this time carried the real possibility of failure. Not unexpectedly as I look back upon it, in the middle of the November 2006 fundraiser celebrating my 75th birthday, I fell ill.

Over two months of my recovery while I meditated on my situation, I learned that the Board, staff, faculty, volunteers and Associates had stepped up in my absence to manage every aspect of TDS without dropping a stitch. I had the experience—for the rst time—of the great living heart of The Drawing Studio beating merrily along on its own, without my important ministrations. And, also not unexpectedly, I began to get really well and really excited about our future.

In February 2007 our Board of Directors held a day long retreat, a remarkable day of new introspection and new resolve along with hard-nosed nancial planning. As our facilitator Jan Aalberts pointed out that day, “Change always causes upset—yet change is also the only constant you can count on in any really healthy enterprise—so process your upsets as you must, but learn to get through them quickly, so that we can respond to the changes and indeed step ahead of them with new vision.”

Then in a moment at our March meeting, this amazing Board took full action. We looked at our reserve assets set aside for six years, and realized it was now time to spend them as a calculated investment in new space and staff. We chose the Gibson space, realizing that by joining our future to the reinvigorating energies of Tucson’s historic cultural center, we were also choosing to join our contribution to everyone working for a welcoming and people-friendly downtown life.

We recognize that as we re-model and expand our art programs we will also quickly need to find new partners and investment to join us. But I have to say that I myself stand in awe of the courage of our Board of Directors and its president Bruce Cobb for their leap of faith. Now with your help we have the invigorating challenge of our work together in our new home.

 

©2007 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reproduced in any form without permission