Herron is a member of an international consortium of art and design schools that offers a program of foreign study in the beautiful town of Pont-Aven in Brittany, France. While the consortium enables Herron to offer its own program—rather than just suggesting students hitch a ride with another US school—it also provides Herron students with opportunities to live and make art alongside students from other schools in the consortium. Attending Herron’s Pont-Aven programs means months of extraordinary growth and development.

Herron students travel to a small French town with a great largess of opportunity for the young artist. The program stresses intensive studio time, interaction between students from all over the world, and the chance to soak in the rich history and cultural habits of France. As Herron student and Pont-Aven participant Alicia Obermeyer puts it, “Pont-Aven certainly connected me to the international art world. My instructor immensely improved my creative process. There were interns and students from places like Paris, Jamaica, and Hong Kong. To me, their perspectives were ultra fascinating.”

While Pont-Aven students have many opportunities to travel around France, including Paris, being based in Pont-Aven gives the program its wonderful reputation for intensive art study—a sense of intimacy with the place itself quickly develops and a whole new world opens up. Students work with little distraction other than the kind that can transform one’s art practice; the surroundings tend to liberate the young artist. French culture, with late-night café conversations, lively festivals and concerts, and a landscape too beautiful for words, inspires students to develop a new sense of play in their work. As Obermeyer says, “The way people live in Pont-Aven is also worth mentioning. Everyday life is appreciated, I think. A restaurant is a place to go and spend a couple hours to eat and chat, not grab and go. We were also required to walk everywhere, which slowed things down in a good way. . . . My experience in Pont-Aven changed a lot of things for me, and I really think it has made me a better artist.”

Becoming better artists is, of course, the point of foreign travel for our students. Herron has been sending students to Pont Aven for over ten years, and we have a number of other international travel programs. Herron students have become better artists, designers, and scholars through travel to Belgium, China, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands, as well as the cities of London and New York, with new destinations under consideration. About a third of the students who participate in international travel programs are awarded scholarship support.