The Cultural Producer: Abby Pucker
If people agree to be curious, they should be treated with respect and should be spoken to as if they are part of this world that they are curious about.
5 QUESTIONS WITH ABBY PUCKER
Founder, Gertie
Chicago, IL
Abby Pucker is a cultural producer who builds initiatives sitting at the nexus of the creative economy and civic engagement. She is interested in leveraging the collective power and resources of this next generation of wealth and creative talent to find more sustainable solutions to building a just and equitable creative economy. Abby is particularly focused on Chicago and recently launched a Chicago-based platform called Gertie. Gertie is a community platform made up of culturally curious young professionals who engage with the city and each other in new ways. Gertie provides membership access to programming in partnership with Chicago’s most exciting institutions, artists and cultural movers & shakers – the ones you know and the ones you should get to know.
To this end, most recently, Abby produced Skin in the Game, a 50 artist exhibition in Chicago's Fulton Market neighborhood in partnership with Jeff Shapack and Alec and Jennifer Litowitz. The second project from the Gertie platform is (A)Part Chicago — a guidebook and cookbook to the city through 26 civic leaders who have helped build the arts and culture ecosystem in Chicago. As Mass Moca’s inaugural Creative Producer in Residence, Abby is working in partnership with Moca’s new Executive Director Kristy Edmunds on a festival in North Adams that aims to show the ways in which the creative economy and artists can work in partnership with local businesses and the community to spur economic development for the city as a whole.
Prior to producing under the Gertie banner, Pucker produced and launched Madison Wells' Chicago-based immersive art experience, Nevermore Park, based on Hebru Brantley's Flyboy. Her film credits include Emily Cohn’s “CRSHD,” which premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and was released in virtual theaters May 2020, “When Jeff Tried to Save the World” starring Maya Erskine, and Erica Rose’s “Girl Talk” which premiered at Outfest in 2018. Additionally, she is a board member of The Marshall Project, Pioneer Works, Ghetto Film School, and the progressive American political organization, Run for Something.
1. Congratulations on the launch of GERTIE! Tell me about the inspiration for the platform.
Gertrude Stein was ahead of her time. Born in Pittsburgh, raised in Oakland, and best known for leading the Paris salon scene of the 1920s, she was a queer, Jewish author who brought people together. Stein was an outsider who became an insider. She refused to abide by the rules, and gathered people that “polite society” would never think to introduce to one another — writers, thinkers, actors, painters, and patrons from different cultural clusters.
I’ve been thinking about Gertrude a lot lately. Over the years, I’ve become the de facto social secretary of my friend group, and I've used food and cultural conversations to bring together friends from various social circles. So much so, that my good friend and AMAZING Chicagoan Ximena Beltran Quan Kiu used to call me her “little Gertrude Stein.”
Hence… Gertie!
2. We are witnessing profound calls for systemic societal change, specifically with regards to wealth, power, and equity. What is the best role for the cultural sector as we re-imagine these systems… specifically how do cultural producers, such as yourself, play an effective role?
I think cultural producers need to frame the creative economy as something that people must invest in, not just continue to look for grants as the only source of revenue. Grants are a piece of it, but so is corporate sponsorship (with as few strings attached as possible) and gifts from individuals and crowdfunding that are aimed at actually helping to build audience (while simultaneously funding projects). A lot of this work is more exhausting than just applying for a big grant that can be a single source of funding. But I am a big proponent of building audience while funding and making sure that those things are intrinsically linked.
This is why art is essential because it takes a goddamn village, and it means people HAVE to trust and rely on each other!
3. We’ve talked about democratizing the audience engagement process by bringing arts to (broader) audiences outside the institution. In your work, how could these experiences best be reframed and what have been the biggest challenges to this new model?
An example of audience development being intrinsically linked to funding –— just a few weeks ago, Gertie organized an Artist Studio “Progressive”, where we got a group of about 35 people together to visit 5 different artists’ studios over the course of a 4-hour period. The people experience with art collecting ranged from very experienced, to just having bought their first piece of art, to not understanding the value of investing so much money in art, but being open to hearing about it. We also had other artists and curators join the tour so that there was a variety of perspectives present within the arts ecosystem. I believe that if people agree to be curious, they should be treated with respect and should be spoken to as if they are part of this world that they are curious about — not spoken down to or given a dumbed down version of “art speak.”
At the beginning of the visits, I acknowledged that a “studio visit” is really just a convoluted way to say that you are meeting an artist and spending time in their space and getting a view into their work and process. Just THAT shifting of language to say something more universally understood — without watering something down, being honest, saying it like it is — is powerful. It arms people with new information. Then, if they chose to use that language of “studio visit” moving forward in their life is their choice. But now they know something new and that instills confidence to ask about some things they might not know as we continue to build a relationship. This also disarmed the artists and made them feel like they were in a safer space of informality — like they didn't have to perform, but just shared the space with people who were genuinely curious about their work.
After the visits were over, we hung out in one of the artists’ studios and had pizza. It was a time and space for people to connect with the artists 1:1, and for the artists to connect with one another. There was no barrier between artist and visitor; we were legitimately SHARING space.
The event had multiple goals — one goal was to build a new group of people who could imagine themselves to be collectors (if they weren’t already on that path). Towards the end of our time together, a playwright and incredible activist that Gertie is working with to produce a play spoke about their work. We then had arranged each of the artists to put a piece up for sale after the visits and agreed that the artists would get 50% of the sale of their work, and the other 50% would go towards the play. This play is a nonprofit production, so having these artists support one another was a really beautiful thing and empowering on a whole other level.
The challenges are that it's frickin’ hard, time consuming, and takes a lot of trust and a lot of humans who all have their own stuff going on! The reason I’m able to hire someone to work on this full-time with me (shoutout to my amazing Director of Ops and Programming, Vic Wynter) is because I am getting a creative producing fellowship from MASS MoCA, and have the belief and support of the amazing (MASS MoCA director) Kristy Edmunds to do a project that is about this type of work in North Adams, and taking the learnings there and applying it back to Chicago. I am also able to do this because I have a safety net. I could never do this if I was framing this in a hyper-capitalistic model or raising venture capital, which many funders have to do in order to be able to pay themselves. It’s a tricky predicament.
A lot of next gen people are overwhelmed by their privilege especially in a world where there is a lot of negative attention around wealthy people — and in many instances, it's absolutely warranted. The way I see it, I didn't make the money that I have access to. Many of the rooms I’m able to walk into are only open to me because of the success that those before me have had and the reputation that they’ve built. So for me, my goal is to figure out the best way to have the most impact possible and pay that privilege forward while acknowledging that I have a massive head start. I am trying to find creative ways to reallocate my wealth and access to make it generative for people outside of just myself and my family. I see the business that I’m building as the risk capital or early case study for a model that could potentially make money and be viable for people who aren't in my privileged position. I chose to see my privilege as a great source of strength and a huge responsibility that I take incredibly seriously, the only choice for myself as someone with the access to capital, a network, and proximity to decision makers.
4. As arts giving remains stagnant at ~4% of overall (private) charitable giving, next era donors — including those inheriting the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history and new wealth creators — are turning away from the arts to support areas they perceive as greater drivers of social progress. Why do you think this cohort is drawn to other sectors?
I don't think that they’re necessarily drawn to other sectors, I just think the arts does literally zero cultivation of any new donors or people who might be interested in arts even though their parents were not. They just rely on the same families and the “next gen” of those families instead of actively cultivating high impact/high potential earners in different sectors that might be interested in the arts. Just invite them to the conversation. I think that if the arts organizations within the philanthropic sector started being more proactive in the way they prospected for new donors and got creative in their programming to attract new young professionals, they would be more successful in the long run.
I also think the arts needs to be more vocal and tell better stories around the importance of the cultural sector to the business sector. We need to appeal to those young people who are our next generation of business leaders – whether they have inherited wealth or made wealth themselves. I was just at a luncheon for the MCA Chicago and they honored Michael O’Grady, the CEO and Chairman of Northern Trust. In his speech he talked about one of the reasons that Northern Trust is such a major supporter of the arts in Chicago is because for business to succeed, cities have to be thriving/succeed and for cities to succeed, we need a thriving/vital creative economy. A thriving arts economy is good for the bottom line.
5. Arts Funders Forum (AFF) research shows that the cultural sector has been experiencing a crisis of relevancy — both arts funders and cultural leaders tell us that the arts do a subpar job of expressing the sector’s value to society. What is the best way to articulate art’s social value and impact?
Art builds community, it builds economy, and it increases business’s bottom line. It’s not always about the art itself. It’s about what the people and process around the art can create.
The Path Forward interview series, an initiative of MCW Projects LLC, investigates how cultural and philanthropic leaders are re-envisioning the future of the arts.