City Arts Centre (CityArts) was a community arts organisation in central Dublin founded in 1973 and liquidated in 2012. History Originally named, Grapevine Arts Centre and later City Arts Centre, it occupied a number of premises in the centre of Dublin, beginning at Mary Street and then North Great Georges Street, North Frederick Street, Moss Street and purchasing a location at Bachelor's Walk in 2010. The organisation grew from a need by a group of teenagers in Dublin's culturally bleak mid 20th Century. This was particularly the case if you happened to come from a working-class background, which was the case for most of the Grapevine founders, and is also the reason why the location of the centre was the unfashionable inner city's, North Side. The three main initiators of the project were Jackie Aherne, Anto Fahy and Sandy Fitzgerald. As the 1970s progressed, the organisation became more culturally politicised, linking in with the radical community arts movement in the UK. This fruitful collaboration resulted in a wider world view and a move to work for a different perspective on culture, one that recognised difference and the rights of people with regard to cultural equality. Linking with similar projects that had emerged (notably City Workshop and Moving Theatre in Dublin and Neighbourhood Open Workshops in Belfast) in Ireland by the early 1980s, the community arts movement grew to be a force for change, resulting in new policies and perspectives that challenged the cultural orthodoxy. In 1984 the representative group CAFE (Creative Activity For Everyone) was formed, with Grapevine as a founding member. Grapevine's artistic programme grew alongside its philosophical awareness and this programme was diverse and multifaceted and took place both within the centre, around the suburbs of Dublin and throughout Ireland. Examples of this diversity can seen through its street theatre programme, directed by Thom McGinty (later to become the Diceman), hair cutting, street fashion design studio, audio art, street events, gigs and random acts of fun in public places. They had an innovative visual arts programme directed for a while by artist John Carson, later of Artangel in the UK. This included early shows by John Kindness amongst others including an exhibition of drawings from the survivors of Hiroshima, organised in association with a young U2. The relationship with U2 continued into the centre's next phase when, in 1988, there was a name change from Grapevine Arts Centre