Michelle Obama Meets the 2-Year-Old Who Sees Her as a Queen

Parker Curry is just 2 years old, but she already has an online following and has met Michelle Obama. On Tuesday morning, the toddler who captivated the internet with her reaction to Michelle Obama’s official portrait got together with the former first lady for a dance session to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.”

Parker’s rise to internet fame began after Ben Hines, a museum patron, posted a photograph of her staring open-mouthed at Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

The image was shared thousands of times across different platforms, and soon enough, an acquaintance tagged Parker’s mom, Jessica Curry, in the comments. “I was trying to get her to turn around so I could take a picture, but she wouldn’t cooperate,” Curry told BuzzFeed. “She just wanted to stare at it. She was fascinated.” According to The Washington Post, Parker thinks Michelle Obama is a queen. Curry is not sure whether Parker knows who Barack Obama is.

Online, people shared the image over and over, commenting on the importance of representation and the hopefulness captured in the girl’s expression. “This is such a powerful moment,” Tabitha Yvette wrote on Facebook. “The look of awe on her face, mouth agape, whether she knows it or not, she has been changed.”

Sherald weighed in as well. “When I look at this picture I think back to my first field trip in elementary school to a museum,” she wrote on Instagram. “There was a show up of work by painter @thebobartlett whose work still inspires me to this day. There was a painting of a black man standing in front of a house. I don’t remember a lot about my childhood, but I do have a few emotional memories etched into my mind forever and seeing that painting of a man that looked like he could be my father stopped me dead in my tracks. This was my first time seeing real paintings that weren’t in a book and also weren’t painted in another century. I didn’t realize that none of them had me in them until I saw that painting of Bo’s.”

Curry couldn’t have known that the image would have an effect on so many people, including, as it turned out, Michelle Obama, who addressed Parker in her Twitter and Instagram posts: “maybe one day I’ll proudly look up at a portrait of you!” The words harked back to her comments at the portrait’s unveiling last month.

“I’m also thinking about all the young people — particularly girls and girls of color — who in years ahead will come to this place and they will look up and they will see an image of someone who looks like them hanging on the wall of this great American institution,” Michelle Obama said on Feb. 12 at the National Portrait Gallery. “I know the kind of impact that will have on their lives, because I was one of those girls.”

And who knows? Parker could be one of those familiar faces for a little girl someday, too.