One of the local institutions with which The Quiet in the Land is collaborating in Luang Prabang is the Luang Prabang School of Fine Arts. There are three art schools in Laos: the one in Savannakhet serves the southern region, the one in Vientiane serves the central region, and the one in Luang Prabang, founded in 1974, serves the northern region.
The Luang Prabang School of Fine Arts offers a four-year program with courses in five departments: sculpture, painting, applied arts, art decoration, and molding. Its seventeen lecturers teach eighty students from the six northern provinces. Each year the school accepts about twenty students. Ten are from the province of Luang Prabang; ten are from the other provinces, with two from each province. Upon graduation, the students return to their home province, where they do an eighteen-month internship. The school has played a major role in the revival of traditional culture in Luang Prabang over the past several years.
From April 24 through May 7, 2005, fifteen students from the Université de Vincennes, Paris 8—Saint-Denis were in residence in Luang Prabang for an exchange program organized by The Quiet in the Land and Association Artamplitude. During the residency, they collaborated with students from the Luang Prabang School of Fine Arts. In the mornings, the Vincennes students offered workships to the Luang Prabang students in photography, videography, and computer graphics. In the afternoons, the Luang Prabang students offered the Vincennes students workshops in painting, sculpture, and lacquer making. The Vincennes students donated much of the equipment that they had brought with them, including cameras, computers, a scanner, and a printer, to the school. In addition, they offered to a first-year Luang Prabang student a four-year scholarship, with partial funding for an additional six years of study in Vientiane.
A group of students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, under the direction of Dr. Carol Becker (Dean of the School) and Jeffrey Skoler (Professor of Film) will travel to Luang Prabang in January 2006. Another group of students from the Columbia University School of the Arts, New York, will also travel to Luang Prabang.