Standing behind an ornately carved urn, an older, white-haired woman points to the 16th century Florentine piece and then looks straight at the camera. Out of her mouth tumble words the viewer does not expect.
“Haters will say this urn is mid,” she says, “but they don’t know we’ve clocked its tea.”
The Instagram Reel features National Gallery of Art curator and Deputy Head of Sculpture Alison Luchs, and her hilarious use of Gen Z slang to present a piece in the museum’s collection has gone viral, with 2.1 million views in just three days.
The Reel represents the kind of artistic reinvention that the museum wants to attract for a campaign offering artists nationwide the chance to earn a $3,000 honorarium and show off their creative side on social media. The Open Call runs from January 13 to February 28 and invites proposals for a short-form video reinterpreting artwork from the gallery’s collection. The campaign is part of a slate of programming to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday. The museum will choose 50 of the proposals, giving each artist $3,000 to execute their vision for a video to be featured on social media and in the National Gallery of Art.
Luchs’s script is a sly nod to collaborations across cultures and generations, as the slang used by Gen Z online often derives from African-American Vernacular English and LGBTQ+ ballroom culture.
“All fax, no printer, people have been remixing art from day one,” Luchs says in the Reel, “and now, creative baddies are bringing that energy to the internet.”
The humorous video came together when Sydni Myers, senior manager of social media at the National Gallery of Art, asked Luchs to work with her team on the announcement. Luchs, who has been a curator at the museum since 1983, was unavailable for an interview with Washingtonian, but Myers says, “We were amazed that only in a few days she was able to memorize the fun script that our Millennial and Gen Z colleagues concocted.” The veteran curator nailed her delivery in just one take.
The recent Reel isn’t Luchs’s first brush with Instagram stardom or Gen Z slang. She appeared in a similar viral video posted on the National Gallery of Art Instagram account in December. Presenting a 16th century Maiolica plate, she describes the woman painted on it as a “snatched girly” who was “freshly yesified,” and an off-camera voice promptly corrects her pronunciation to “yassified.” That video has received over 6 million views on Instagram to date and is now the museum’s most popular Instagram post ever, according to Nick Sharp, the chief digital officer at the National Gallery of Art. Myers says Luchs has earned a new nickname among her colleagues for her social media prowess: “The Museum Rizzler.”
The National Gallery of Art hopes the Open Call—and the youthful way they’re spreading the word—will appeal to art lovers nationwide.
“We truly want to show people that their creativity belongs at the National Gallery,” says Myers.
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