What if the problem with Chicago's art world isn't a shortage of artists, galleries, institutions, or ideas—but a shortage of connective tissue? This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie sits down at the Gertie Hub with Gertie founder Abby Pucker and Head of Programming, Partnerships & Membership Chanelle Lacy for a conversation about building audiences, building collectors, and building cultural infrastructure in Chicago. The story starts with Gertie's origin: Abby's long-running interest in getting people into the same room, her return to Chicago during COVID, and a listening tour that revealed a strange contradiction. Chicago had museums, galleries, artists, spaces, and ambitious programming everywhere—but plenty of people still felt like they had nowhere to go and no way into the culture. Gertie emerged as an attempt to close that gap. From there, the conversation becomes a much bigger argument about Chicago. Why does the city produce so many remarkable artists and cultural workers while remaining so difficult for mid-career artists to sustain? When does Chicago's legendary self-reliance become a silo? What happens when "we don't care what New York thinks" stops being freedom and starts becoming a defensive posture? And what kind of infrastructure would make it easier for artists to stay, return, grow, and find audiences here? That leads directly into Chicago Exhibition Week, running September 14–20, 2026: Gertie's citywide effort to make Chicago's existing cultural ecosystem radically easier to enter. Abby and Chanelle talk maps, directories, marketing, partnerships, galleries, museums, new collectors, and the deceptively difficult work of getting people off Instagram and through the door. Along the way, Duncan asks the most basic—and maybe hardest—question: what is the value argument for art? Chanelle answers that art lets us see the world through someone else's eyes and creates a context for difficult conversations. Abby talks about curiosity, connection, discovery, and the pleasure of feeling "in on" a cultural conversation. All three keep circling the same problem: who is building new art fans now? The discussion also wanders happily through Riot Fest, music-festival graphics, the Armory, Coachella, Lollapalooza, art fairs, neighborhood galleries, collecting, Chicago parking, and the possibility of turning a finance professional into an art freak. Then the radio fades out... In the internet-only nugget, the conversation gets into the brass tacks: Gertie Curious and Gertie Curated, membership programming, collection and studio visits, cultural travel, and the relationship between membership and the organization's public-facing work. From there, Abby and Duncan go deep on a question Bad at Sports has wrestled with for years: why build a cultural organization as a for-profit instead of a nonprofit? That opens a long discussion about philanthropy, grants, mission creep, institutional agility, donor power, KPIs, governance, learned dependency, the economics of culture, and whether an art industry can be sustained almost entirely by galleries, auction houses, and charitable giving. The answer, at least here, is not especially tidy—which is why it is worth listening to. It may, however, begin with Abby's simplest proposition: It's cool to care. NAME DROPS / FURTHER READING Guests / Gertie Gertie — https://www.gertie.co/ Abby Pucker / Chanelle Lacy / Gertie team — https://www.gertie.co/about Gertie membership — https://www.gertie.co/membership Gertie Instagram — @gertie.chicago — https://www.instagram.com/gertie.chicago/ Chicago Exhibition Week Chicago Exhibition Week 2026 — September 14–20, 2026 — https://www.chicagoexhibitionweek.com/ CXW 2026 map — https://www.chicagoexhibitionweek.com/2026-map Gertie exhibitions discussed 82 Nights Only* — September 16–December 13, 2026, Gertie Hub — https://www.gertie.co/exhibitions/82-nights-only Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984–2015 — https://www.gertie.co/exhibitions/over-my-head Ornament & Information — Chicago Cultural Center — https://www.gertie.co/exhibitions/ornament-and-information Earlier projects / people Art in Common — co-founded by Zoe Lukov — https://www.artincommon.art/about-2 Zoe Lukov — https://www.zoelukov.com/about-mission — Instagram: @zoelukov Next Stop: Chicago — https://www.nextstopchicago.co/ Neighbors art fair — https://www.neighbors.art/ Mirka Serrato / Neighbors background Vic Mensa — Next Stop: Chicago. Chicago art ecosystem / venues Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago — https://mcachicago.org/ Art Institute of Chicago — https://www.artic.edu/ The Renaissance Society — https://www.renaissancesociety.org/ Chicago Cultural Center — https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/chicago_culturalcenter.html SECRIST | BEACH — https://secristbeach.com/ Spudnik Press Cooperative — https://www.spudnikpress.org/ Corbett vs. Dempsey — https://corbettvsdempsey.com/ Recess — https://recesschicago.com/ All Together Now — https://www.alltogethernow.fun/ SVRN — https://www.svrn.com/ Music / festival / cultural comparisons Riot Fest — https://riotfest.org/ Mike "Riot Mike" Petryshyn — Riot Fest founder The Armory Show — https://www.thearmoryshow.com/ Lollapalooza — https://www.lollapalooza.com/ Coachella — https://www.coachella.com/ Knockdown Center — https://knockdown.center/ Membership-program references The Joffrey Ballet — https://joffrey.org/ Lyric Opera of Chicago — https://www.lyricopera.org/ Art Basel Paris — https://www.artbasel.com/paris Other institutions / art-market references Gagosian — https://gagosian.com/ Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) — https://www.moma.org/ Barnes Foundation — https://www.barnesfoundation.org/ Bad at Sports — https://badatsports.com/ Lumpen Radio / WLPN 105.5 FM — https://lumpenradio.com/
