Vernon Hills High School Art Students Participate in The Memory Project

This past school year, several junior and senior AP Drawing and 2D Design students in Allison Molloy's AP Studio Art class at Vernon Hills High School participated in The Memory Project. This nonprofit organization invites art teachers and our students to create portraits for youth around the world who have faced substantial challenges, such as neglect, abuse, loss of parents, and extreme poverty.

This year VHHS was paired with children from an orphanage in Romania, and eight VHHS student artists created nine original portrait drawings and paintings for these children. Memory Project volunteers traveled to Romania this summer to personally deliver the portraits to the children.

Below is a link to a special video documenting students' drawings and paintings, as well as the reactions of the children across Romania receiving their portraits. The fees that Art Department paid to participate in this project as a school resulted in a collective financial donation among all participating schools of $4,120 to help support the children's therapy programs in the orphanages.

Thank you to VHHS students Agustin Sandoval, Alex Kinderman, Alyssa Pasternak, Daria Potarskaya, Iuliia Boyarskiy, Lauren Johnston, Sarah Kain and Tiffanny Ong for their artwork and for making these children feel valued, important and beautiful from thousands of miles away!

View the video: https://drive.google.com/a/d128.org/file/d/0B0zRdzq6HJgnanFxc3VyenF0M1k/view

Learn more about The Memory Project: https://memoryproject.org/