The 2023-2024 Memory Project: Creating Portraits of Kindness for Children from Columbia
“The Memory Project” is a nonprofit organization that invites art teachers and their students to create portraits for youth around the world who have faced substantial challenges, such as neglect, abuse, loss of parents, and extreme poverty. Over the past seven years, Drawing and Printmaking and NAHS students have created over 440 portraits for children in Madagascar, the Philippines, and Syrian refugees in Jordan, Puerto Rico, the Rohingya in Rakhine, Columbia, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Sierra Leone. This year, students at OHHS created portraits for 30 Columbian children.
The children in this project all live in a very poor shanty town. Over the past decades, many Colombians have fled to such shanty towns to escape the drug-related violence, murders, and kidnappings in their country’s more rural areas. Systemic poverty in these shanty towns leads to many on-going social problems, especially for women and children. Fortunately, these children are being helped by an organization that provides them with healthy nutrition and early childhood education.
“The Memory Project” portraits are created by students enrolled in the Drawing and Printmaking course (grades 9-12). Once the portraits are delivered to the children, we will receive a video of their reactions to the artwork. Below are some of the highlights of the OHHS Drawing and Printmaking students’ resulting portraits:
