Behind the scenes, she’s a fierce advocate for the overall visitor experience, and her work extends beyond talks and tours to labels, media, and more.
Loren was one of the first people to welcome me into the department of Interpretation. Since then, she’s become a friend, a sounding board, and a confidant. She has a special talent for finding and amplifying the coolest stories and voices our galleries have to offer, and I’m excited for you to get to know her better through this conversation.
Marielle: Hi, Loren. I’m excited to talk to you about your work—our work, really, as we have the same job title: assistant director of Interpretation.
Loren: That’s right.
Marielle: When I explain to people what we do, they’re often surprised to hear that this sort of work exists. How do you describe it?
Loren: There are a lot of ways to talk about interpretation, and everyone describes it a little bit differently. I usually tell people that I work in storytelling at the Art Institute—I work with curators and designers to make sure the narratives we tell in the galleries through labels and other media, like audio tours, are accessible and relatable to anyone who walks through our doors. Our audiences are really diverse, so this is incredibly important. We also conduct research with visitors to better understand how they’re engaging with these materials and how the materials are being received.
Loren Wright and Marielle Epstein in the museum’s North Garden
Marielle: Did you always know that you wanted to do this type of work?
Loren: Not at all. Interpretation is a relatively new construct at museums, and jobs like mine didn’t really exist when I was growing up. As a kid, I wanted to be an author—my mom taught me to read before I started kindergarten, and I quickly became a regular at our local library.
Loren’s first library card
When I got a little older, I wanted to be an editor. In college, I thought about academia. There are pieces of all of that in the work that I do now—a lot of it is writing, editing, and research—so it makes sense to me that I ended up here.
Marielle: How did you find your way to this job specifically?
Loren: In undergrad, I did an independent research project that involved making a digital museum exhibition. I found that I loved sharing knowledge in that way, through something you actively experience. I didn’t really grow up going to museums in my hometown of Milwaukee—they weren’t really in my parents’ wheelhouse—but the project got me thinking more about museums as spaces for public learning. Eventually I decided to go to grad school for museum studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Grad school ended up coinciding with the pandemic, and just as the world was opening back up in 2021, the Art Institute offered an internship in what was then Publishing and Interpretation. I had just worked on Fwd: Museums, a museum studies journal, and I’d also learned a lot about inclusion and accessibility, the values that underpin interpretive work, in my studies. So I applied for that internship, and I got it! It just so happened to be really good timing, because within a few months, Interpretation became its own department, and I was offered a full-time position.
Marielle: I see those values at play in your work all the time. In particular, you’re a big advocate for including external voices in our gallery materials—voices of people who have lived experience of whatever it is that we’re addressing, or including the artist’s voice more when we can. A lot of this happens on labels.
Loren: Totally. Right now I’m working on labels for On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival, and nearly a dozen of them are written by artists and other experts from outside the Art Institute. I love being able to include personal perspectives, because labels can sometimes seem so neutral.
Marielle: What else makes a good label?
Loren: That’s a great question. There is a maxim we’ve borrowed from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is that we shouldn’t tell visitors what to think but what to think about. A label should never tell you how to feel about a work. Instead we want to give you a little scaffolding and some ideas to grapple with and let you draw your own conclusions. Aside from that, I think a good label uses a lot of active voice with vibrant and descriptive language that feels alive.
Marielle: Yeah. And a Loren label usually has a question in it.
Loren: I do love a question.
Marielle: Let’s talk a little about some other things you love. One of the things that unites our whole department, actually, is our shared love and undying passion for “Sex and the City.” Aside from staying very abreast of Carrie’s hat choices, what do you do outside of work?
Loren: First I should tell you that I’ve taken five “Which character are you?” quizzes for that show recently, and I got Carrie every time.
Marielle: Oh, no.
Loren: I’m mortally offended. I’m anti-Carrie, mostly because she’s a bad friend.
Marielle: I don’t think you’re most like Carrie. You might be season 1 “Sex and the City” Carrie. You’re definitely not “And Just Like That …” Carrie. She’s out of control.
Loren: Thank you! Okay. What do I do for fun? I read, I write, I edit Wikipedia articles. I love movies. I’m one of those weirdos who goes to the movies alone all the time. I recently gave a tour here about the movie Sinners, and I’m thinking about doing some gallery programming around pop culture next year. It’s very fun to match a work of art to a movie or a song.
Enjoying art together at the Asian Art Museum’s 2023–24 exhibition Murakami: Monsterized
Marielle: And you’re a gamer.
Loren: Yeah, I’m really into the Sims.
Marielle: What havoc do you wreak on their worlds? Are you a Sims Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet?
Loren: I appreciate some chaos. I’m not causing chaos all the time, but I do like to have a little chaos. Otherwise it’s not really fun.
Marielle: That’s true.
So preparing for this interview, I started to think back on our time working together. You started in this job a year or two before I did, and I remember when I first started, we went for a walk through the galleries together, and you pointed out one of your favorite artworks to me.
Loren: Water Drop by Mineo Mizuno.
Marielle. Yes. Now every time I see that piece, I think of you.
Mineo Mizuno
Purchased with funds provided by Fred Eychaner
Loren: I distinctly remember the first time I saw it installed in the gallery. Its label was one of the first I ever worked on, and I had only seen a photo of the work—there’s always something different about seeing it in person. It’s really emotionally raw. The artist shaped it and then gouged a chunk out of it. He was reflecting on his father’s death. With this work, you can literally see the artist’s hand in a really visceral way.
Marielle: What are some of your other favorite works?
Loren: I love the sculpture court in our Arts of the Americas galleries. One of my undergrad majors was American culture studies, and I love to dig into American history and American art. Back then, I wrote papers about Fight Club and Nicki Minaj, exploring how they reflect the cultural moments they came out of. Our sculpture court contains a wide variety of works that tell all of these different narratives concerning what American art is, and ultimately what America is. It has everything from a bronze sculpture of Lincoln and Remington’s The Bronco Buster to a buffalo horn spoon carved by two Native artists, Kevin and Valerie Pourier, and Leslie G. Bolling’s Sister Tuesday, a poplar wood carving of a church lady that’s painted to look like bronze.
Marielle: Yeah. And those contrasts, and the natural questions that arise from them, invite people to be really thoughtful and inquisitive.
Loren: Exactly. For me it’s a way to see how far we’ve come.
Marielle: I want to shift a little bit to some of the big projects that you’ve worked on in your time here, which include everything from your first show as an intern, The Language of Beauty in African Art, to the current Caillebotte exhibition. What’s been the most memorable for you so far?
Loren: Working with a living artist is always really memorable, and the textile show Gio Swaby: Fresh Up was my first time doing that. You can’t go to Gustave Caillebotte and ask him for a quote, you know? But I got to sit down with Gio and ask her questions directly, and she’s just the sweetest, most generous, and most easygoing person ever. We included her words in some of the labels and also made an audio tour and a video that featured her. Gio’s perspective thoroughly shaped the exhibition, right down to how the works were installed.
With artist Gio Swaby in 2023
Marielle: And now you’re working on the Elizabeth Catlett show, which has been previously presented at the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art and is such an exciting exhibition for this museum in a lot of ways. How are you approaching the visitor experience here in Chicago?
Loren: Because this show had a life before coming here, all of the texts arrived to us fully realized. But we adapted them for the Chicago presentation. Catlett spent some very formative years in Chicago, and we’ll be highlighting her connection to the city more. She was trained by Grant Wood of American Gothic, so that’s a really close connection.
Marielle: Definitely. I want to be sure we talk about some of the tours and lectures you’ve given, and this reminds me of the talk you gave for Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde. In that talk, you connected the art of the show’s five Post-Impressionists to the works of contemporary Chicago artist Amanda Williams, which is probably not an obvious parallel.
Leading a talk on Hokusai’s The Great Wave with colleague Arianne Nguyen, 2024
Loren: The idea was suggested to me by our colleagues in Engagement, actually, so I can’t take credit for that. But I had so much fun developing it. This was the first talk I ever gave here, and it’s still one of my favorites. I focused on the industrialization of Paris and of Chicago and how these cities, which were inspirations for the artists, were actually very similar. And it was so well received—I was in shock, because I didn’t yet feel like I knew what I was doing. But people still come up to me sometimes and say, “I know you.” And it’s because they came to that lecture and enjoyed it and took something meaningful away from it personally. And that’s really, really cool.
—Loren Wright and Marielle Epstein, assistant directors of Interpretation
