Art for the Community: Walker-Grant Middle School Art Students Partner with Animal Shelter
The students will create illustrated adoption profiles for available dogs at Olde Dominion Humane Society.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
Email Adele
Cadence, a student in the gifted visual arts program at Walker-Grant Middle School, showed the pencil portrait she’d been working on to the subject.
The subject sniffed her portrait and then barked.
“I think she likes it!” said art teacher Hannah Carter.
The subject of Cadence’s portrait was a dog currently available for adoption from Olde Dominion Humane Society.
Carter took students in the gifted visual arts program on a field trip to the shelter on Friday, where each student chose one of the adoptable dogs to feature in a custom pet portrait. The completed portraits will be posted on the shelter’s website and social media pages, where they’ll hopefully attract more public attention to the adoptable dogs.
Carter said the goal of the field trip, beyond helping the dogs find forever homes, was for her students to understand that “their art can help the community.”
She got the idea for the project from a post she saw in a Facebook group for art teachers, and thought it would be a good experience for her students.
On Friday afternoon, almost every dog at the shelter had a middle school student sketching away in front of it. Many of the dogs posed like professionals for their portraits, sitting up close to the bars of their kennels and making eye contact with the artists.
The completed portraits can be done in any style or medium the students choose, Carter said. They’ll be posted on the shelter’s website and featured on the Facebook page when complete.
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
Support Award-winning, Locally Focused Journalism
The FXBG Advance cuts through the talking points to deliver both incisive and informative news about the issues, people, and organizations that daily affect your life. And we do it in a multi-partisan format that has no equal in this region. Over the past year, our reporting was:
First to break the story of Stafford Board of Supervisors dismissing a citizen library board member for “misconduct,” without informing the citizen or explaining what the person allegedly did wrong.
First to explain falling water levels in the Rappahannock Canal.
First to detail controversial traffic numbers submitted by Stafford staff on the Buc-ee’s project
Our media group also offers the most-extensive election coverage in the region and regular columnists like:
And our newsroom is led by the most-experienced and most-awarded journalists in the region — Adele Uphaus (Managing Editor and multiple VPA award-winner) and Martin Davis (Editor-in-Chief, 2022 Opinion Writer of the Year in Virginia and more than 25 years reporting from around the country and the world).
For just $8 a month, you can help support top-flight journalism that puts people over policies.
Your contributions 100% support our journalists.
Help us as we continue to grow!
This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”