How the Art Institute of Chicago Is Building Mindfulness Into the Museum Experience

What happens when you design for “how do I be with the art?” rather than “what is the art?” — and why a live gallery programme and a digital audio tour are better together than either could be alone.

There’s a question that museum professionals have been circling for years: how do you make a visit feel personally meaningful, rather than simply educational? For Marielle Epstein, Assistant Director of Interpretation at the Art Institute of Chicago, the answer came from an unexpected direction — mindfulness.

 A Different Kind of Question

The Art Institute welcomes nearly 1.5 million visitors each year. Its collection spans centuries and cultures, and its programmes are wide-ranging. But Epstein and her colleague Gina Giambalvo, the museum’s Digital Studio Director, found themselves asking a question that most museum audio tours and gallery labels don’t address: not “what is the art?” but “how do I be with the art?”

Both had an existing interest in mindfulness — the practice of deepening attention to present-moment experience — and both had noticed the same gap. The museum produced engaging, educational content, but relatively little that spoke to emotions and senses rather than facts and interpretation. Abstract or non-representational works, in particular, could leave visitors feeling that the art simply wasn’t for them.

Mindfulness, they realised, offered a way in. It gave visitors permission to slow down, look more closely, and notice their own reactions — without needing expert knowledge to do so.

Starting with Live Programming

Rather than jump straight to producing digital content, Epstein took a more grounded approach. In summer 2024 she launched Mindful Looking, a monthly in-gallery programme that invites visitors to spend 45 minutes to an hour with a single artwork or gallery. Each session blends facilitated discussion, writing activities, and group exercises, and culminates in a guided meditation tied to the session’s theme.

The programme was designed as an on-ramp for people new to meditation as much as for seasoned practitioners. It also draws both regular museum members and first-time visitors who are curious about art but looking for a different kind of entry point. More than 40 people came to the first session. Eighteen months in, a community of regulars has formed — people who return each month, bring friends, and welcome newcomers.

Crucially, Epstein treated Mindful Looking not just as a programme in its own right, but as a research environment. She deliberately selected artworks that were also on the shortlist for an audio tour the museum was developing in parallel. This let her test ideas in real time, watching which prompts sparked conversation and which fell flat.

Layers of Learning

The data she gathered was both quantitative and qualitative. Attendance figures told her how many people were coming, and how many were returning visitors versus newcomers. Visitor feedback surveys — completed after each session — offered detailed, unprompted reflections on the experience. Many participants described finding the slower, more contemplative format transformative; something they hadn’t imagined a museum could offer.

Epstein also kept her own record: a self-reflexive writing exercise completed immediately after each programme, capturing her impressions as a facilitator — what worked, what surprised her, what verbal feedback visitors had shared on their way out. Over time, these layers of reflection gave her a clear picture of what content could translate into audio and what couldn’t.

Building the Audio Tour in Parallel

While Mindful Looking was running, work on the audio tour was continuing alongside it. The tour is being developed for the Art Institute’s free mobile app and Bloomberg Connects, and is designed to be evergreen — available to visitors on their own schedule, at their own pace, as a more solitary experience.

One of the central challenges was a creative one: how do you capture the warmth and energy of a group gathering in a gallery, and translate it into something a single visitor experiences through headphones? The answer the team arrived at was not to try to replicate the live experience, but to make the digital version something different and special in its own right.

To do that, Epstein and Giambalvo brought in poet Pádraig Ó Tuama — host of the podcast Poetry Unbound — to create custom audio stops for the tour. His approach, using language to draw people into closer relationship with their own inner experience and the world around them, felt closely aligned with the aims of mindfulness.

Before recording anything, they invited him to the museum to see the artworks in person and to co-facilitate a Mindful Looking session. The logic was deliberate: experiencing visitor responses in real time would help him understand what the audio content needed to do. The programme sold out within 36 hours. Visitors travelled from across the Midwest to attend, many of them new to the Art Institute entirely. For Ó Tuama, being in the room with a live audience gave him a much clearer sense of how people respond to prompts for close looking and personal reflection.

Two Experiences, One Framework

What’s emerged from this process is something more structured than it might first appear. The live programme and the audio tour are genuinely distinct products — they serve different audiences, offer different things, and have different limitations. Mindful Looking is bounded by gallery space and a monthly schedule; the audio tour can reach visitors at any time, in any order, at whatever pace suits them. The live programme can hold silence together; the audio tour can use music to create its own kind of atmosphere.

But the two have shaped each other in ways that neither could have achieved alone. Working through ideas in front of a live audience has helped Epstein distil what’s worth carrying into audio. Editing and refining those ideas for audio has, in turn, sharpened the live programming. And across a year and a half of monthly sessions, she has come to know the audience — not as an abstraction, but as real people whose responses she has observed and whose reflections she has read.

“Now, when I work on both,” she reflected, “I know who I’m doing it for.”

What Other Museums Can Take From This

The Art Institute’s approach points to something worth considering more broadly. Visitor research doesn’t have to mean surveys and focus groups conducted before a project begins. It can be woven into programming itself — where the live experience generates both community and insight, and where the people who show up month after month become the clearest signal of what an audience actually needs.

It also suggests that live and digital content needn’t compete. The goal isn’t to digitise what happens in the gallery, but to understand what each format does best — and to let each one be fully itself.

Marielle Epstein presented this work at the Museums & Wellness Summit 2026. She is Assistant Director of Interpretation at the Art Institute of Chicago.