The opening of Philagrafika 2010 put Philadelphia at the center of the art world. With more than 300 artists, exhibits at five major regional cultural institutions, and presentations and demonstrations at 88 area sites, Philagrafika explores the role of the printed image in modern society. It will continue to showcase Philadelphia's cultural community and creative economy through next month.

In addition to drawing praise from critics and the arts community, the festival has raised the question, "How did they do that?"

This feat of collaboration and community is happening in a time of scarce funding and retrenchment for cultural organizations. Many in the national arts community have been amazed that this region's major institutions cooperated with fringe arts collectives, galleries, and artists to bring it about. Ten years ago, Teresa Jaynes (now Philagrafika's executive director) and I wrote a short paper on how to create an economy friendly to printmaking and artists. My company hired Teresa, and we invited more than 15 museums, art schools, artists, galleries, and fine-arts print shops to a meeting. Nearly all of them showed up and never left.

We created the Philadelphia Print Collaborative on the spot, without a budget but with a clear sense that we could do more by working together. Within a few months, we had launched more than 50 exhibits to complement the Philadelphia Museum of Art's groundbreaking 2001-02 exhibit "Dox Thrash: An African American Master Printmaker Rediscovered."

We proposed that museum officials work with a totally unknown group, linking to a Web site and dozens of independently organized exhibits, and they said yes in about three hours. Pooling our resources, we produced lectures, demonstrations of printmaking techniques, and more than 70,000 Web-site hits in two months.

Each year brought new ideas, projects, and prints, with artists and master printers giving their time and creativity to raise money for the organization. Portfolios have found their way into nationally important collections, contributing to Philadelphia's reputation as a city where art is taken seriously and joyously.

Always looking for new challenges and opportunities, we at the collaborative began to wonder, "Why not an international festival?" The Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Moore College of Art and Design, Temple's Tyler School of Art, and the Print Center committed to serve as major venues, without a hint of how we would raise the money to pay their curators, much less the artists and other costs. A new name, "Philagrafika," was coined.

When the economy tanked, we cut budgets and cut some more. We approached the brink of collapse, but no one would accept giving up.

Printmaking is an essentially collaborative process: Artists and printers join forces to make ideas into art. Similarly, each organization that gave of its time and treasure for this effort has been strengthened by its generosity. My hope now is for all in our community to share in this abundance of art made possible by cooperation.