Michelle Obama meets 2-year-old who was mesmerized by her new portrait

(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

last updated 7 March 2018

Parker Curry, 2, went from standing in awe before a painting of Michelle Obama at the National Portrait Gallery to having a Taylor Swift dance party with the former first lady in her living room.

At the portrait's unveiling last month, Obama said she was thinking of girls who "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." When Curry went to the gallery last week, another visitor took a photo of her staring intently at the modernist painting of Obama, and it went viral. Her mother, Jessica, took Parker and her infant sister, Ava, specifically to see the portraits of the Obamas. She told BuzzFeed News she was trying to get Parker to "to turn around so I could take a picture, but she wouldn't cooperate. She just wanted to stare at it. She was fascinated."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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