Yasmine Iskander
Yasmine C. Iskander b. 1997 d. 2024 Yasmine Iskander was an abstract artist who worked primarily with acrylics on canvas and on paper. Guided by her passionate inner life, Iskander expressed her world in brilliantly colored abstract paintings. She built compositions by alternately veiling and revealing shapes, applying washes that soften edges and then marking the plane with geometric or biomorphic elements that assert themselves with decisive clarity. "My art expresses my feelings about the happy moments in my life, but also about the difficult times I have had, especially my many heart and brain surgeries," Iskander once explained. "When I paint, I feel strong, excited, exuberant and emotions flow as colors! I feel it in my heart. The colors and shapes that guide my work pop into my head. I use a range of vibrant colors." Iskander's visual responses were shaped, in part, by her deafness-a condition that sharpened other senses and altered the way she attended to the world. She cultivated a heightened visual attentiveness: a sensitivity to rhythm in form, to the cadence of color shifts, to the spatial qualities of layered shapes. "As a Deaf artist who wears hearing aids, I know that there are many ways to communicate. Colors are the most direct and powerful," said Iskander. Rather than defining her work by limitation, this aspect of her life enriched it, producing paintings that feel attuned to subtler registers of perception. Her canvases translate experience into a distinct aesthetic grammar. Over the course of her career, Yasmine’s work was selected for inclusion in more than 35 juried exhibitions including in First Street Gallery, Viridian Artists Gallery and Manhattan International Arts, in New York, The Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences, in New Jersey, Hamilton Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, the Athenaeum Gallery, the Art League Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center, Del Ray Artisans, and MPAartfest in Virginia. She also received numerous awards and recognitions. Most notably, in 2018, she received the Second Prize in the 2018-19 Kennedy Center VSA Emerging Young Artist national program. Her piece "Dragon" toured the country as part of an exhibition entitled Detour which culminated at the Kennedy Center Hall of States. An image of this winning artwork was also part of a public art installation at the Kennedy Center's REACH campus. Iskander was also featured in Good Morning Washington (WJLA), Elan Magazine, Fairfax County Public Schools YouTube, the University of Minnesota-Institute of Community Integration Impact Magazine, and several local newspapers. Her collectors are in several states in the US, as well as in Germany, Spain, Italy, Uruguay and Mexico and include individuals and large corporations, such as Amazon, Google, Carr Company, Citizens Bank, Fifth Third Bank, Bank of America. In April/June 2026, the McLean Project for the Arts presented the Inaugural Solo Exhibition “Yasmine C. Iskander: Life Through the Power of Color”. This exhibition was presented in conjunction with the establishment and dedication of the Yasmine C. Iskander Gallery at the McLean Project for the Arts Berlage Arts and Education Center. www.yasmineiskanderart.com [email protected] is a 23-year-old intuitive abstract artist. She works primarily with acrylics on canvas and on paper. Her art is passionate and direct. It captures the vibrancy of her extraordinary life journey and her personal interpretation of the world around her. Yasmine started her professional art instruction in 2015. She is continuously experimenting with layering, painterly strokes, gestures, marks, textures, colors. In general, she prefers acrylics (high flow, heavy body, fluids, markers) which are particularly suited to her colorist talent. She loves to paint on large canvases or paper as larger surfaces best enable her to express her creativity and boldness. Yasmine has participated in several juried exhibitions including in Viridian Artists Gallery in Manhattan, New York, the Atheneum Gallery, the Torpedo Factory and Del Ray Artisans, in Alexandria, Virginia, and MPAartfest in McLean. In 2018 Yasmine got an Artistic Achievement Award from the Community Artists Mentoring Program of the Arlington Artists Alliance. In 2018, she received the Second Prize Award in the 2018-19 Kennedy Center VSA Emerging Young Artist program. Her piece “Dragon” toured the country as part of an exhibition entitled Detour which culminated at the Kennedy Center Hall of States.

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