Hello, and welcome. I’m Diane Tucker. I was just seven years old when I visited the Detroit Institute of Arts for the first time. Walking beside my grandmother, I whispered, “I wish I could live here.” We were standing in the large gallery that is home to Diego Rivera’s renowned Detroit Industry Murals. At the far end of that palatial space, I spied a marble staircaseāand imagined it led straight to my bedroom.
As I’ve grown older, I occasionally feel less at home in art museums. Their vastness can be overwhelming, like being in a Gothic cathedral. Oddly enough, I react this way despite having led more than 300 gallery talks at the magnificent National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
While research shows that visiting a museum elevates the feel-good chemical dopamine and lowers the stress hormone cortisol, itās the stories that draw me back. They remind me that Iām part of something bigger.
For years I’ve earned a living writing and producing storiesāabout Henry Ford’s famous River Rouge Complex (Discovery Channel), a widow who stood up to ISIS (National Geographic Explorer), and America’s historic 2008 presidential election (Huffington Post), to name a few. So when the head of MIT’s AI lab told me that our ability to tell our own stories gives us a unique advantage over computers, I knew he was right, even though I know zero about computer algorithms.
Great works of art tell deeply human stories. I’m eager to share these…
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