The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston School of the Arts in Charleston, SC, will host the 26th annual juried student art exhibition, Young Contemporaries 2011, on view from Apr. 1 -26, 2011. This year’s exhibition juror is Amy Mackie, Director of Visual Arts at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, LA. A concurrent exhibition, Salon des Refusés, will also be on view in the Hill Gallery during the same time frame.

Each spring, current College of Charleston students may submit recent work to the Young Contemporaries annual exhibition, giving them an opportunity to have their work chosen by an outside curator and exhibited in a professional gallery setting. Works are available for sale at the discretion of the artist, offering the community a great opportunity to purchase artwork by these emerging artists.

Young Contemporaries 2011 is made possible by generous support from Lee and Ann Higdon.

Concurrent with Young Contemporaries 2011 is the Salon des Refusés exhibition to be shown in the Hill Gallery within The Marion and Wayland H. Cato Jr. Center for the Arts. The origin of the “Salon des Refusés” dates to Paris in 1863, when artists who had been rejected from the official Salon caused such a protest that Emperor Napoleon III ordered another exhibition held for them. Among the painters in this “Salon des Refusés” were Camille Pissaro, Henri Fantin-Latour, James M. Whistler, and Edouard Manet. Following suit, the Salon des Refusés at the College of Charleston is curated by the Studio Art Department from the released Young Contemporaries submissions.

The Visual Arts Club at the College of Charleston chose Amy Mackie, Director of Visual Art at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, as this year’s juror. Mackie was previously a Curatorial Associate at the New Museum in New York where she organized numerous exhibitions and projects. In 2005, she curated Open, an exhibition organized in conjunction with Paul Ramírez Jonas’ public art commission, Taylor Square in Cambridge, MA.

Mackie has curated exhibitions and worked on projects with a number of artists including Nicole Eisenman, Mariam Ghani, Sharon Hayes, Ana Prvacki, and the New York-based collective LTTR and Ridykeulous. She was the recipient of a 2009 CEC Artslink Grant to produce a project in Sofia, Bulgaria and completed a fellowship in 2010 at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, UK, where she researched the work of Helen Chadwick. Mackie holds a Master’s degree in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College.

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art is administered by the School of the Arts at the College of Charleston and exists to advocate, exhibit and interpret visual art, with an emphasis on contemporary art.

Young Contemporaries 2011 is co-produced by the Halsey Institute, the Studio Art Department, and Visual Arts Club at the College of Charleston.

For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Institute at 843)953-4422 or visit (www.halsey.cofc.edu).