Yasha Young at Quarantine
Yasha Young has built things that weren't supposed to exist.
A museum for urban contemporary art in Berlin, fundraised from zero to twenty-five million euros. Three galleries across London, New York, and Berlin, running simultaneously, showing artists the traditional art world refused to look at. An art fair that forced the establishment to merge with her because she had the taste and the audience they didn't. A biennial that shut down a four-lane street in Berlin and turned it into a crumbling city of the future. The art programme for Lollapalooza Berlin, inside the Olympic Stadium. A curated neighbourhood in Abu Dhabi, built from sand, with an all-women team, under the protection of His Majesty's personal security detail.
She is a curator. She is a producer. She was a VIP first-choice buyer at Art Basel. She curated the entry hall of the Humboldt Forum -the largest museum in Germany. She is a clinical art therapist who has worked in war zones for the United Nations. She went to Harvard. She survived a stroke that erased her memory for weeks. She survived breast cancer. She adopted fourteen children. She once lit candles on stage for David Bowie for two hundred and fifty dollars, and that was her first job in the industry.
She has mentored at Quarantine's Strange Heaven (April 2025) and returns for Hunter's Moon (October 2026).
None of this is on her LinkedIn. All of it is in the room when she sits across from you.
What Yasha Young does NOT do at Quarantine
Yasha Young does not give a lecture on the art market. She does not tell you how the art business works from a PowerPoint. She tells you from having built it, broken it, rebuilt it, lost her memory, and rebuilt it again.
At Quarantine, Yasha offers three private 45-minute mentorships over the week -just you, your work, and a woman who has spent twenty years deciding which artists get shown and which don't. She will look at your portfolio. She will look at your website. She will look at your Instagram. And she will tell you things that no gallerist, no advisor, and no career coach will tell you -because they need you to like them, and she doesn't.
At Hunter's Moon, she brings something more. Something she hasn't done anywhere else in this format. We're not going to describe it here. You'll know when you're on the island.
What she actually sees when she looks at your work
Most artists think the art world doesn't see them because their work isn't good enough. Yasha would say that's almost never the problem.
The problem is that you have no idea how to be seen.
Your website is from 2019. Your Instagram handle wasn't on the drawing you gave someone important. Your portfolio has no mission statement -no single sentence that tells a curator why you do what you do. You don't know what a factor sheet is. You don't know how to price your work. You've never researched whether the gallery you're applying to shows work at your price point. You've never thought about what provenance means, or why it matters that someone can trace where your painting has been.
These are not talent problems.
They are infrastructure problems. And they are killing careers that deserve to exist.
I want to see a clear and solid message. I want to see who you are, what you paint, and by your history, I want to see that you can repeat it. I want to see that you have your own voice. But I also want to see that you have some business sense.
If you're gonna do an application to a gallery, have a mission statement. It's just a statement of why you do what you do and what interests you. That interests me.
From her masterclass
We don't publish masterclass content. But Yasha operates at a speed and a directness that leaves marks. Here is some of what stays with you.
On doing vs. knowing:
Everything I do today, I have learned because I did something, not because I went to school. I also went to school. I went to Harvard. I did all of that. However, I did. Doing is where you learn.
Yasha has no patience for theory that doesn't touch the ground. Her entire career was built by doing things no one gave her permission to do -opening galleries, starting art fairs, building museums, constructing entire neighbourhoods. She didn't wait for the art world to invite her. She built a parallel one and made the old one come to her.
On the real gatekeeping problem
You can only show in a very fancy gallery if you've been in a museum, but you can't get into a museum because you don't get a show at a fancy gallery. So where do we begin, and where does this end?
This is the circular trap that most artists feel but can't articulate. Yasha didn't solve it by playing the game better. She solved it by building her own museum, her own galleries, her own art fair -and then making the system acknowledge that her artists belonged inside it. That's not a strategy you learn in a business course. That's a worldview.
On networking -the real version
What do we learn from that? I probably don't have a pen. I probably don't have a paper. So give me something to write things on. If you give me something, write it on the back. Do something. I can't make it up, and I won't have the time to figure it out.
If you want something, you contact me. I will not contact any single one of you. Write me, and write me again, and write me one more time, and we'll get together.
Networking, in Yasha's world, is not exchanging business cards at an opening. It is being ready when the door opens for exactly three seconds. Having your handle on the back of the drawing. Having your website updated. Having a body of work that can be sent in one link, right now, to the person who just asked. Most artists miss these moments not because they're unlucky, but because they're not ready.
On what she really looks for
When you make an application with me, the thing I look for is a clear and solid message. I want to see who you are. I want to see that you're capable of producing not only one series, but a second series. And I want to see that you have your own voice, that you're ready to have your own voice.
If you get a rejection from a gallery, it doesn't mean another gallery won't like you. It just means you're not right at this moment in time for me or for someone.
"Ready to have your own voice" -not "that you've found it." Ready. There's a difference. Yasha is not looking for finished artists. She's looking for artists who know what they're about, even if the work isn't there yet. The voice is a direction, not a destination.
On who she is, and why it matters
Nobody will tell you who you are. There is nobody to tell you. So you have to figure out yourself who you are —what values, where are your strengths, where are your weaknesses, and how are you going to go about in the world.
I make my life, my projects, my ideas exactly how I want them. And nobody, but really nobody, has the right to tell me it will not work.
Yasha was abandoned at birth. Adopted, returned, adopted again, boarding school, street kid at eleven. No parents to tell her she'd turn out like her father. No family script to follow or rebel against. She built herself from scratch — her values, her direction, her career, her entire life. When she tells you to figure out who you are, she's not quoting a self-help book. She's describing the only method that ever worked for her.
On the thing nobody teaches
I started a school for artists because I'm pretty sick of artists not learning about my portion of the art world, which is the business. How do I start something? How do I present myself? Who am I really in this current circle of the art world, which is consistently changing?
This is the gap that art schools, ateliers, workshops, and residencies leave wide open. They teach you to paint. They teach you to draw. Some of them even teach you to think. None of them teach you how to exist as a professional artist in a world that requires you to know what a factor sheet is, how provenance works, why your mission statement matters, what price point your work belongs at, and how to walk into a gallery without looking like you've never been in one.
Yasha built a school inside her museum to fix this. At Quarantine, she brings that same knowledge -but stripped of the institutional format and aimed directly at you.
On cheerleading and self-care
Be your own cheerleader. Surprise and inspire yourself. Support and love yourself. Kick yourself in the ass when needed. Be your harshest and hardest critic, but always be your greatest caretaker.
This sounds warm. It isn't. It's an operational instruction from a woman who had a stroke, lost her memory, got it back, got breast cancer, and came out the other side with one conclusion:
The things I keep are the things I love, and what I love is teaching —giving my knowledge to someone. In case I have another stroke, there will be a person I taught who will be able to teach another person.
She's not cheerleading you. She's telling you that nobody else is going to do it, and that waiting for the art world to validate you is the most expensive mistake you'll make.
Why Yasha Young is at Quarantine
Yasha doesn't need Quarantine for her career. She doesn't need the exposure, the fee, or the credibility. She has a museum, a rolodex that could fill a phonebook, and enough stories to write three memoirs.
She's here because she's seen what happens when artists with real talent and zero business infrastructure try to make a career. They get eaten. They get exploited. They price their work wrong, miss their moments, sign bad contracts, and eventually decide that the art world is rigged against them -when the truth is they just never learned the part that (almost) nobody teaches.
She's here because Quarantine is the only place she's found where that gap can be addressed in the same week as the creative work itself. Not art on one side and career on the other. Both at once, in the same pressure cooker, on the same island, with the same mentors.
I think it takes a certain person to work with a creative person. You need to be very aware of when you control the creative spirit and when you let it run.
She knows when to push and when to let you breathe. She also knows that the moment you leave the island, the window starts closing. Which is why, when she hands you a connection, she expects you to use it -and she will find out if you don't.
This is not a career workshop
If you're looking for an art business seminar, a career coaching session, or a portfolio review service, there are plenty of those. They'll give you templates, checklists, pricing formulas, and a certificate of completion.
What they won't give you is a woman who was a VIP buyer at Art Basel looking at your actual work and telling you, to your face, what a collector sees when they see it for the first time. What a gallerist checks before they reply to your email. What makes her scroll past, and what makes her stop.
They won't give you seven days on an island where the creative dismantling and the professional reality happen in the same breath — where the same week that breaks your patterns also shows you how to carry the new work into a world that doesn't know you've changed.
"Only those will succeed in life who are superior to their circumstances."
That's Einstein. Yasha quotes it often. She would know.
→ Yasha Young on Instagram → Urban Nation Museum, Berlin
Yasha Young mentors at Quarantine Experiment #7: Hunter's Moon. October 2026. Lazaretto Island, Menorca.