The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has named Howard University architecture professor and sketch artist Brad Grant as its first-ever Instagram artist-in-residence.

During his year-long residency, Grant will wander the gallery’s halls and attend openings, lectures and installations—when the museum reopens, that is. He’ll make sketches based on what he sees and post his work to the museum’s Instagram account.

The exact plans for his residency are still a bit up in the air due to the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing shutdown. “It’s in some ways an experiment,” Grant says. His first drawing to go on the museum’s Instagram featured a sketch not of the museum, but of artists putting up Black Lives Matter murals in downtown D.C.

“[The stay-at-home order] allows me to wander downtown in an empty city and look at things in a very different way,” Grant says of the fact that the Portrait Gallery and most other D.C. museums are still closed.

Museums often appoint artists-in-residence to create work inspired by the museum’s holdings and to interact with the public on its behalf. But the idea of an Instagram artist-in-residence is relatively new.

Paris’s Musée d’Orsay was one of the first to create the position: It named its first in January, appointing illustrator Jean-Philippe Delhomme. In his weekly posts, he imagines what artists of the past might post if they were alive today.

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Over the past few years the Portrait Gallery has begun to cultivate its Instagram following.

Kim Sajet, the Portrait Gallery’s director, credits some of their burgeoning success on the platform to the accessibility of portraiture compared to, say, abstract expressionism or religious art from the Middle Ages.

“Art can be this kind of club, and you can feel you’re not a part of it,” she says. “But when it’s portraits and you’re looking at people, it’s immediately much more approachable.”

The museum got its first taste of social media stardom when it unveiled its portraits of former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama in early 2018. The portraits took on a life of their own almost instantly: Visitors waited in long lines to take selfies in front of the paintings to post to their social media accounts. One photo of a 2-year-old girl staring in awe at the First Lady even went viral.

The paintings’ online reach had real-word implications for the museum. Its visitor numbers jumped from 1.3 million in 2017 to 2.3 million in 2018, according to the Smithsonian’s tracking.

Other leading D.C. art museums have been experimenting with Instagram during the shutdown. The National Gallery of Art hosts virtual gallery tours on Instagram, where it has more than 434,000 followers. Curators use Instagram Stories to introduce entire gallery spaces, then focus on a few works of particular significance.

As the coronavirus continues to spread in the Washington region, Instagram might be one of the only ways museums can connect with the community for some time. The National Gallery of Art will begin a partial reopening next week, but only on the ground floor of its West Building.

The Smithsonian has not announced reopening plans for any of its museums yet.

“It’s a lot easier to close a museum, it turns out, than to open one in a pandemic,” Sajet laughed. That’s why she’s so excited about adding an Instagram artist to their toolbox of outreach efforts.

“Even though we’re closed,” she says,” we’re able to have really serious conversations about art and identify, and what’s happening out in the community.”

This story originally appeared on WAMU.