Small-Town Museums Are Killing It—on the Internet

Pairing paintings, tapestries and sculptures with songs and sound clips, these museums have become unlikely social-media stars.

“I love her, but she’s an attention whore.”

The Worcester Art Museum, whose four floors include the arms and armor galleries, is becoming known online for its savvy meme tactics.

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow appears to whisper this crass confession to his daughter in a popular TikTok post from Massachusetts’ Worcester Art Museum titled, “what the paintings talk about when the Museum is closed.”

That line never appeared in “Paul Revere’s Ride,” of course. It’s a clip from the Hulu series “Pen15” that became an audio meme on TikTok this summer. Zachary Critchley, who oversees the target="_blank" class="backlink" data-vars-page-type="story" data-vars-link-type="Manual" data-vars-anchor-text="Worcester’s digital media,">Worcester’s digital media, saw it as a perfect opportunity to showcase both the 1869 portrait and the museum’s personality.

“There’s a reputation that museums, and particularly art museums, have of being kind of stuffy or like elitist or something like that, which is not something that I personally agree with,” says Critchley.

Small museums, looking to raise their profiles and educate the masses, are turning their paintings, sculptures and tapestries into the unlikely stars of TikTok microdramas.

Critics might call it lowbrow, and drawing a direct connection to increased attendance is often difficult, but the social glow up is pushing the museums into the cultural conversation. Plus, the institutions say, it’s serving a more lofty goal: to democratize an art world that often feels exclusionary.

“I want to make people laugh, and I want to make them interested in, in this case, 19th-century art,” says Kelli Huggins, who manages social media for Fenimore Art Museum and the Fenimore Farm and Country Village, in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Huggins has logged two decades in the museum world. These days, she logs hours scouring TikTok and beyond for songs and other soundclips to perfectly complement the ageless characters populating Fenimore’s collection.

The museum’s account is entirely meme-themed. And yes, there is a real art in finding communion between 19th-century photos of mules and donkeys and the 1990s hip-hop classic “Back That Azz Up.”

“Pretty sure this is what Juvenile was talking about in the song, right?” the post asks, no need for a wink emoji. Fans were primed for the joke, with one describing it as “perfection” and another writing, “This is why I pay my phone bill.”

Fenimore Art Museum has gained more than 29,000 followers and racked up hundreds of thousands of views since joining TikTok in July, easily surpassing its older Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Megan Carmichael, of Burlington, Vt., checks its TikTok out almost every morning with her two children. The audio memes in particular sparked an interest in folk art, which she says wouldn’t have otherwise grabbed their attention.

“Because there is this, like, funny or modern sound behind it, we can sort of talk about how these are real people living real lives,” Carmichael says of the paintings’ subjects. “It’s taking us into the human side of what’s happening in that art.”

Kelli Huggins’s posts for Fenimore draw heavily on millennial magnets like ‘Bob’s Burgers’ and those lesser lights of 1990s hard rock, Creed and Papa Roach.

Fenimore’s madcap style makes perfect sense on an app like TikTok, where users expect more spontaneity than on the more heavily curated Instagram, says Taylor Alber, a New York-based digital strategist who runs the popular Museum TikTok account. This is especially true for smaller museums looking to stand out and build an audience.

Alan Harrison, an author and speaker who advises nonprofit arts institutions, described such posts as “a case of dumbing it down for the purpose of attendance.” Museums would be better off setting up exhibitions in places like community centers and homeless shelters, rather than using social media to attract younger people who might never visit on their own, he says.

“Community connection and help places the museum in the standing of ‘community hero,’ rather than ‘that cat video thing,’” says Harrison.

The largest establishments, like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, generally favor behind-the-scenes talks with curators over memes. But the goal is the same.

“When The Met launched its TikTok account, the goal was clear (and still is today), to not be a white ivory tower,” says Karen Vidangos, the museum’s senior manager of social media.

The cat video thing has, however, paid off for the Getty Museum.

In August, the Los Angeles institution introduced one of its newer acquisitions—a turquoise Chinese-and-French porcelain cat—to TikTok with an International Cat Day post.

The 18th-century artwork, appropriately named “Purrquoise” by fans in an online poll, was shown dancing across images of other feline figures, to the nearly 20-year-old ditty “The Kitty Cat Dance.” At least 289,000 people saw the video, which the Getty didn’t pay to promote. An earlier, more traditional post focusing on Degas has only 1,225 views.

The museum has used TikTok for several years, but is still in an experimental phase, says Sarah Waldorf, head of social media for parent organization the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Getty’s team could tell the cat campaign was attracting new visitors when they began to see people tagging themselves in front of the sculpture and using its nickname, which doesn’t appear anywhere in the museum itself, says Waldorf.

Quantifying real-world success on social media is difficult, no matter how many followers an account may have. Views, comments and shares are paramount, and since each museum is both a business and an educational institution, they find value in raising awareness even—or especially—among audiences who may never actually visit.

TikTok has helped Fenimore expand its fan base well beyond the number of people who could be reasonably expected to buy tickets, says Kerri Green.

“If this many people are seeing it but they’re not coming to the museum, is that a failure?” says Kerri Green, Fenimore’s director of marketing and communications. “The answer is no.”

Sometimes the algorithms do align. After months obsessing over Fenimore’s TikTok, Carmichael and her meme-loving children plan to drive the three or four hours from Vermont to Cooperstown in April for a family trip based entirely around the museum.

She doesn’t expect to meet its TikTok manager. “Please tell that person I truly love them, whoever they are.”

Write to Patrick Coffee at patrick.coffee@wsj.com