North artists make memories for underprivileged kids

Recent visitors to Nashua High School North may have noticed the outstanding artwork on display in the gallery just outside the main office. Each year, North students enrolled in Advanced Placement art class “give back” by participating in the Memory Project Initiative, a program in which advanced high school art students create original portraits for foreign children who have been abandoned, orphaned, abused or neglected. Founded in 2004 by Ben Schumaker, of Madison, Wis., the project reaches kids in more than 30 countries. Each year, art students across the nation are assigned to create portraits of children whose ages range from infancy to adolescence. The initiative’s goal is to help underprivileged children develop a sense of personal identity and self-worth. The portraits depict the children not as objects of pity, but as the strong and spiritual heroes they truly are. Previously, Nashua North sent portraits to children living as far away as Ecuador and Taiwan. This year, Vincent Levallee’s AP class was assigned a group of 16 Vietnamese orphans. The paintings were counted as a class project.