It’s that time of year again. Each spring, students have the chance to submit their work to the annual College of Charleston Young Contemporaries competition, an exhibition that the College puts on each year to showcase young talent in the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. This will be the 25th Young Contemporaries exhibition.
“This event brings in one of our biggest crowds of the year,” said Mark Sloan, renowned author, curator and director of the Halsey Institute.
Sloan has been the director of the Halsey Institute since 1994, but this is the first year that the work will be showcased in the new Halsey Institute, located in the Marion and Wayland H. Cato Jr. Center for the Arts, the perfect venue for the competition’s silver jubilee.
There were over 450 applicants in this year’s competition, with only 80 accepted across a variety of media including photography, painting, drawing, printing, sculpture and video.
 Each year, a different juror examines the submissions, deciding which ones are worthy of the exhibition.
Young Contemporaries also runs in concurrence with Salon de Refuses, a French art exhibition dating back to 1863. By definition, the term means “the art of rejects,” but in 1863, the French government sponsored the inclusion of many works of art that were rejected from the Paris Salon.
This year’s exhibition will include the works of Camille Pissaro, Henri Fantin-Latour, James M. Whistler and Edouard Manet, showcased in the Hill Gallery at the Cato Center.
This year, Sloan has secured Mary Jane Jacob, a sculpture professor and Executive Director of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago.
Jacob is a world-renowned curator and is actively engaged in the discussion of public art. Jacob is well-known for her dialogue in public art. She has organized  community-based art initiatives from racial topics to international athletics. Culture in Action was a two-part project focusing on bringing together the once-divided Mexican and African American minorities in Chicago and surfacing issues of gentrification that emerged along with some of the city’s construction projects through its poorer neighborhoods. “Conversations at the Castle”  is a collaborative book surrounding the 1996 Olympic Games addressing connections between contemporary art and the public.
Jacob’s work in Charleston, Places with a Past, makes her most fitting to be the juror for this year’s Young Contemporaries. Unveiled at the 1991 Spoleto Festival, Places with a Past explores the cultural, historic and contemporary realities of Charleston through site-specific projects that show parts of this community that are often hidden by its more glamorous attractions.
Jacob is all about art in action and the underlying question of how to put art into action. Her work explores how public art can not only be interpreted and appreciated by individuals, but how communities can interpret and benefit from art.
“I personally find that I have art experience when I’m not in museums,” Jacob said in her lecture preceding the exhibition’s opening.
She has a thorough understanding of what art is to different people.
Young Contemporaries 2010 as well as Salon de Refuses will be open at the Halsey Institute from April 1-27. The opening reception and awards ceremony will be held opening night from 5-7 p.m.