Abby Pucker is speaking to me by Zoom from the driver’s seat of her car, wearing a plain gray sweatshirt, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. “I found this great parking spot on my way to the Loop, and I’m not giving it up,” she says. I wouldn’t have expected Pucker, a member of the Pritzker family (she’s JB’s cousin), to be quite so relatable in her appreciation of something as simple as a good parking spot. But I quickly realize it is this trait that has helped make her a burgeoning, formidable civic fundraiser.

For the past few years, Pucker’s mission has been to energize the arts scene here. Her main vehicle for that is Gertie, the cultural consultancy she founded in 2022. (Gertie as in Gertrude Stein, because Pucker was inspired by the thriving café culture of Paris.) The private agency has already run million-dollar fundraisers, including one for Next Stop: Chicago, seven public art projects installed along the CTA’s Green Line during the Democratic National Convention (or, in the case of the Loop’s Wabash Lights, permanently). Perhaps most impressively, Pucker, 33, has organized what is quickly becoming a tentpole event for visual arts in the city: Chicago Exhibition Weekend, a four-day experience that spotlighted nearly 50 galleries across the city in its second annual edition last fall and also featured artist talks, a nighttime bazaar, and a studio crawl.

Last year, Pucker launched EarlyWork, a Gertie membership program ($55 a month) that gives art appreciators and up-and-coming collectors special access to exclusive events, including meals with artists and visits with established collectors at their homes. “How do we create an ecosystem here in Chicago that is more fertile for the arts?” Pucker says. “The way I’ve found to do that is to create these moments of excitement and energy that amplify and show all of these amazing artists.”