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By LEAH INGRAM EAGLE | Special to the Reporter

After a class trip to the Savannah College of Art and Design’s TVFest in Atlanta in February, members of the Oak Mountain High School Media class received an invitation to be a part of a week-long art intensive at SCAD’s campus in Lacoste, France.

Laura Langston, the senior director of education outreach at SCAD, reached out to media class teacher John Milton and extended the invitation. The SCAD Lacoste campus is located in the Luberon Valley of Provence.

“SCAD essentially owns this medieval hillside village,” said OMMS teacher Malinda Nichols who chaperoned the three students who made the trip. “They have retrofitted it to be a satellite campus.”

The group was made up of Nichols and her mother, former OMHS Latin teacher Teresa Boody, along with students Madelyn Bailey, Jackson Ingle and Mary Walker.

It was 24 hours from the time they left Birmingham on June 12 until they arrived in Lacoste. While there, the students stayed in SCAD dorms in the village and the adults stayed in a 14th century maison in the valley formerly owned by Marquis de Sade, who was a member of Napoleon’s army in the 1800s.

“We saw the kids in the mornings, but it was important to SCAD that our students had the opportunity to immerse themselves in the region as art students,” Nichols said. “They brought several professors from their campuses in Atlanta and Savannah who taught workshops for the students.”

For four days, Bailey, Ingle and Walker were able to visit spots around the Provence region and choose their own workshops that included lavender pressing, transferring dyes from flowers onto fabric, drawing and photography.

The trip was just as fun for the educators too. Nichols said she and Boody had amazing dinners and even visited the home of a former girlfriend of Pablo Picasso.

“Everything SCAD did for the educators and students was incredibly intentional,” she said. “They let us experience the region as artists, art educators… whatever discipline we were in. The professors also did workshops with the educators as well.”

On their last day, the students and educators came together and visited the Sunday market at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Nichols said that was the only day they all got to spend together during that part of the trip.

She wanted to give the students the opportunity to visit Paris, so they added an extra day onto the trip and SCAD arranged transportation for them to take the train over from Avignon.

The group packed as much as they could into the 24 hours they were there, including a five-hour walking tour that included 30 different sites, a mad dash to Shakespeare and Company bookstore before it closed and watching the Eiffel Tower light up at midnight.

“I wanted them to have the most amazing unforgettable experience,” Nichols said. “You can’t come to France and not go to Paris. Just watching these kids fall in love with a foreign country–they could not get enough of it.”

From the students’ perspective 

Bailey said she wanted to go on the trip because she loves to travel and thought it would be a really cool experience to get to learn from SCAD professors in such a new and different environment.

“The experience as a whole was amazing,” she said. “We got to explore all over the Lacoste village and were really able to soak up all of the beautiful scenery and culture and use that as inspiration in the art that we were working on. On our last night, we had a gallery exhibit where we got to showcase what we had been working on all week to the teachers and other students. It was so special to experience so much French culture and get to be creative and learn at the same time.”

Ingle said he wanted to go on this trip because it was a great opportunity to experience and learn new things.

“The experience was amazing,” he said. “SCAD Lacoste was such a cool place and the countryside was beautiful. We did a lot of cool workshops with different people at SCAD and got to go on trips to different towns and attractions. My favorite part of the trip was exploring the towns we went to. Each one was unique and had many things to explore and do.”

Walker said when she heard of the opportunity, it sounded like an amazing, unique opportunity to experience Europe for the first time and see what SCAD had to offer as a potential college.

“It was incredible to get a glimpse of what life is like there,” Walker said. “Life moved so much slower and was so much simpler there. Everything you could ever need was right there in the village. All week we got to work with collage art professors and a professional photographer to create things in the sketch book they gave us. My favorite parts were the market, getting to eat cherries right off the tree in the orchard and drawing at the medieval chateau that was at the top of Lacoste.”

Coming full circle

This was Nichols’ ninth trip to Europe. Her first was with OMHS 22 years ago.

“It was the most amazing full circle moment,” she said. “I never thought that would be something I had the opportunity to do. To be with the students as they experienced it for the first time and completely fall in love with it is one of the most rewarding things I’ve gotten to do.”

She said she couldn’t have been more proud of the students.

“They were so gracious and their attitudes were always good,” she said. “They were always excited about the experiences and appreciated they were getting to get something new and special.”