MPA at McLean Community Center: 2026 Spring Solos
April 30 – June 13, 2026
Emerson Gallery: Works by Zsudayka Nzinga and Darlene R. Taylor
Atrium Gallery: Works by Sabine Carlson
Spring Solo Exhibition Events
May 2, 2026: Spring Solos Opening Exhibition Reception, 2-4pm at MPA at McLean Community Center
May 13, 2026: Tea & Talk, 11am at MPA at McLean Community Center
May 30, 2026: Spring Solos Artist Talk, 11am at MPA at McLean Community Center
MPA’s 2026 Spring Solo Exhibitions are sponsored by the O’Shaughnessy Hurst Memorial Foundation.
MPA Berlage Arts & Education Studio: Yasmine C. Iskander: Life Through the Power of Color and David Carlson: Subtle Connections
April 30 – June 7, 2026
Opening Exhibition Reception: Thursday, May 14, 7-9pm
Yasmine C. Iskander Gallery / Gallery Vivienne: Yasmine C. Iskander: Life Through the Power of Color
Sally & John Simms Gallery: David Carlson: Subtle Connections
Yasmine C. Iskander: Life Through the Power of Color
Guided by her passionate inner life, Yasmine Iskander (1998–2024) 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,” Yasmine 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.”
Yasmine’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,” she said.
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.
David Carlson: Subtle Connections — Selected works from 2016, 2020, and 2023
Using his art as a means of exploring subtle connections, David Carlson believes that the experience of something is more important than the narratives he tells himself. Carlson’s work is guided by philosophies rooted in Taoism and Buddhism, both of which practice connectedness in all things and particularly between humanity and the natural world. Through the language of abstraction, Carlson seeks to express deeper themes of connection, perception, and the ineffable. The goal is an exploration into that which is and that which is ongoing. Within structured boundaries, he navigates the visual elements of balance and tension, obvious and surprise.
