Yasmine Iskander
McLean, VA
“When facing detours, you have to be brave. I was afraid at first when I face each of my difficult medical challenges, but I took lots of deep breaths, and I imagined my family and my community standing with me and making me feel safe and loved. They come into my mind the same way that my paintings come into my mind. They appear, and they fill me with emotion and energy.”
Yasmine Iskander (she/her/hers) was a proud, ArtLifting artist until her passing in 2024. Yasmine’s art shows passion and boldness. It inspires joy and optimism. Her work is passionate and direct. It captures the vibrancy of life and acted as a fundamental way for her to express her journey as a person with developmental challenges and a complex medical history.
Yasmine's artwork found a great deal of success in a short period of time, as Yasmine was only just starting to receive professional art instruction in 2015. Prior to that, Yasmine had always shown an interest and understanding of colors. While her creative process has evolved over time, some aspects have remained the same. Before her passing, she was surrounded by dozens of paints, different colors, different types…. She started looking around and suddenly, she had been captured by a color… and off she went…expressing what was inside, bringing it outside for the whole world to see. As she would say, “When I paint, I feel it in my heart. Painting makes me feel excited, exuberant! I love painting and colors”
Besides her passion for painting, Yasmine cared deeply about others, often going out of her way to help those in need. While in school, she received the Good Samaritan Award for the help she provided her fellow classmates and had spent time working in Senior Residences; spreading happiness and smiles to everyone around her. It was particularly important to her that people in the disability community were understood and received help. For Yasmine, art had a profound impact on her life; through art, she reached her potential and contributed to the community she lived in. One of her dreams was to help other people with disabilities find the same confidence, connection, and success through their own art.
Yasmine had exhibited extensively since she began painting in 2015. Her paintings have been shown at The Torpedo Factory in Virginia, the Del Ray Artisans in Alexandria, the Children’s National Medical Center in D.C., and at the State of Virginia General Assembly Building. She won the Second Prize in the Kennedy Center 2018-2019 VSA Emerging Young Artist Program. As a winner of the curated competition, her piece “Dragon” was part of an exhibition titled Detour, which opened in Washington (Rayburn House in Capitol Hill) and toured the country for up to 2 years.
For Yasmine, being part of ArtLifting helped materialize her dream of being part of a community.
