Yoga dog. Puppet dog. Dog as Pope. Old dog. Snarling dog. Tail of a dog. Even dead dog in a blankie.

Humankind's best friend becomes a subject of adoration and exploration in the most charming art show in South Florida, Dog Tales: Words and Images, Fact and Fiction at the Miami-Dade Public Library System's downtown Main Library. Some 30 South Florida artists celebrate their canine relationships in painting, sculpture, photography and video.

Three branch libraries -- Miami Beach, Pinecrest and South Dade Regional -- also are hosting Puppy Dog Tales: Stories and Images of Dogs and Other Critters, parallel exhibits that feature the renderings of students from Miami-Dade Public Schools and Casa dei Bambini Montessori School.

shows, who served trayfuls of bone-shaped biscuits to the humans who showed up opening night.

And then there's Tillamook ''Tillie'' Cheddar of New York City, Jack Russell terrier and artist. She paints with her paws and teeth. To her already considerable resume, Tillie now adds a solo show at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. At 3 p.m. Sunday, to mark the opening of Tillamook Cheddar Mid-Career Retrospective 1999-2009, she will demonstrate her unique method.

''It's a scratching and biting technique,'' says curator Jane Hart. ``Sometimes she even destroys her creation in her process.''

Three other animal-art exhibits -- It's A Dog's Life: Work from Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz -- the Dog Room Collection, the solo show Virginia Fifield: The Pneumatikos Series, and We (heart) Pets, animal art submitted by Art Center patrons -- will run along with Tillie's.

I'm excited to write about these shows, but right now a real little dog named Cody is poised just inside my front door. He's been howling off and on for a couple of hours, venting his grave sense of loss over the fact that his owner, my daughter, has left the house and demonstrating the powerful emotions that form the crux of all this art:

Dogs love company. Dogs never lie about love. And, of course, nobody loves you like your dog loves you. Not even your mother.

OK, maybe your mother.

''No! My dogs love me more than my mother. I can promise you that,'' artist Laura Cerwinske insists. In her portrait series My Life in Dogs, showing at the Main Library, Cerwinske has immortalized 12 of her 13 dogs -- from Jennifer Margaret Schwartz, ''the cocker spaniel who raised me until the age of 14'' to Shangito, named after the Santería god of thunder.

Except for Jennifer, all the dogs in Cerwinske's portraits were rescued or adopted and, like Bert Rodríguez's dog, photographed wrapped in a baby-blue blanket for the diptych My Dead Dog's Ear Almost Touching, are gone now.

''Painting them brought the pleasure of what it was like to have them,'' Cerwinske says, ``to enjoy again their particular traits.''

Such yearnings have stirred the creative spirit for centuries. The canine-human connection surely inspired the cave artists of ancient France and the Egyptians who placed dog statuary in their royal tombs. British and Spanish dog portraiture flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries, and more recently, artists from Monet and Picasso to George Rodrigue and photographers such as Elliott Erwitt and William Wegman all have been inspired by dogs that tugged at their hearts.

Now Dog Tales, so refreshing to the soul, is intended as summer fun.

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