Christy MacLear

A business person in the creative world. She has never had a job that existed before and is an expert in building businesses and start-ups with a particular focus on art, legacy, place-making, technology and, often, degrees of complexity.

Before we begin - it’s important to know, Christy skied 100 days in 2021 when COVID hit and she moved from NYC/CT to the mountains of Colorado. Emblematic of the fact that Christy doesn’t fear change for the love of learning & adventure.

These day she is back in Chicago, where her son was born over 20 years ago, to lead the formation of a family office / R&D studio called Good Chaos. Appropriately named after the Activist/Congressman John Lewis’ quote “get in good trouble..”, Good Chaos aims to create movements, incubate projects and invest in radical if not fringe models of change-making. In 2024 she’s become a decent angler fishing the rivers of Alaska, Montana and Northern California.

She’s been the first CEO of Superblue, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Philip Johnson Glass House - forming new cultural organizations and business models. From this time, and working with various artist & designer legacies, she has developed a very personal art collection from the artists she knows and has worked with.

Building off her BA in Urban Design and MBA in Real Estate finance she has deep experience in place-making and large scale urban projects such as Disney’s new town named Celebration, Chicago’s movement of Lakeshore Drive to create the Museum Campus and adaptive re-use projects such as The Church in Sag Harbor. In this vein, she’s served as the Board Chair of NYC’s Municipal Art Society and on the Snowmass CO planning council.

Deeply devoted to higher education, she has served on the Board of Trustees for Stanford University and Cranbrook Academy as well as been a professor at the School of the Art Institute and lecturer at UT Austin covering the Metaverse, web3 & experiential business planning. The last thing you really need to know is she loves farmers markets and hardware stores - which has been on her resume since 1988.