WARDEN EXHIBITIONS




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Inspired by the production of culture and ideas surrounding “gatekeeping” and popularity, Warden Exhibitions is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, aiming to platform artists of color. Co-founded by Queen Carrasco and Zidan Zaccaro, the gallery challenges the exclusivity of the art world while engaging with the public through critical dialogue and innovative showcases.

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AwardsChange-Maker Micro Grant
CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies
2025







Last Updated 21.05.2026



                              
 WARDEN EXHIBITIONS x LOGAN ROBINSON
20 AUGUST 2026
Interview and transcript edits by Queen Carrasco. 

queen carrasco: Firstly, can you introduce yourself to us?

Logan Robinson: Hi, I'm Logan Robinson. I'm a poet, photographer, director, and musician.

queen carrasco: I love that. How long have you been a photographer?

Logan Robinson: Only two years.

queen carrasco: Really?

Logan Robinson: I was friends with this person for a little bit. We met at a music video premiere in 2024 for another mutual friend, and she handed me her camera and was like, "Go ahead and do what you want with it." I started snapping some photos, and I was like, " This is pretty cool. I like this.” It's like a different type of seeing.  I took the photos. I waited a couple of days, and another friend texted me, 'Logan, you need to pick up a camera now.' And I'm like, are they [the photos] that good? I didn't know what I was doing. I was shooting in a bar in Soho. I was nineteen. I was in the midst of, like, still recovering from a bad breakup and was so disoriented with everything in society. And then all of a sudden a camera comes into my hands and is like, wow. Direction for once.

queen carrasco: I think that's one of the powerful things about art and the mediums that we choose. One thing I love about photography, I guess as a child of immigrants, [is the] the ancestral connection between us (Black people) and wanting to control our narratives. I think a lot about bell hooks' essay (In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life) and [how] she talks about the way that Black women in the home were caretakers, and therefore they were also, in this way, curators inside the home, organizing the photos, really choosing what to display on the walls.

Logan Robinson: It's photography, down to the materials presented on the couches and in the bedrooms. I think a lot of times artists' parents are inherently curatorial, and that influences them to become artists in some way because it's the first thing you witness. It's even down to plates and cups; people want things to be presentable. Especially people of color, we design things [both] unintentionally beautiful and intentionally beautiful. When you're a child, you don't notice it. You age up ten years, you look back. You're like, oh my goodness, my whole house was this entire gallery of pieces of furniture, clothing, curtains; everything becomes this homogeneous design. You start to recognize that it designed you in a way that, you know, your house is fashioned. Photography fashions the walls in ways. My mom has photos of me from age zero all the way up to now, portraits of me. And she keeps them on her desk. Your parents are curators, even without recognizing it.

queen carrasco: It's innate. Let's talk about your recent exhibition with us. I'll say, first of all, very amazing. In your own words, as the artist, tell us about your submission and your work there.

Logan Robinson:  Thank you for that compliment. This always humbles me. The piece was a seven-minute-long video. It was a style I call ‘video collaging’, which I didn't invent, but I leaned into more over the last year and a half as I started to embrace video work. It displays three different videos. The first one is the BlaqReunited home campaign from summer 2025, curated and designed by the owner, Heaven Peoples, whom I love.

queen carrasco: Shout out to Heaven; we love you.

Logan Robinson: Exactly. She asked me to shoot the video on my camcorder, and we did it at Pier 57, and some B-roll in Harlem. That was the first time I ever video collaged anything because I wanted to try something different. I was wondering what could grasp the eye, but also be something that lives in an archive for years to come? And I shot that. Heaven creative directed it. She looked beautiful. We made a video similar to an eighties ad to represent what home looked like in that season. Yeah. BlaqReunited hosted a lot of open mics, a lot of different events [at the time].

Then came my summer reflection video.  That video was basically a video diary of everything that I had lived through in summer 2025. I went through a bad breakup. I went to Philly for a couple of weeks because I was crashing out. I came home, back to New York City. I started to look at the city a little differently. I started to resent it. In the words of poet Richard Siken, ‘just create against what you're feeling or what you don't like’. So, I created that video against that heavy emotion of resentment towards the city, and I started to recognize why my home was so beautiful and why my home is still so beautiful.

And it's not the city; it's the people in the city, especially people of color. The city is designed by immigrants and people of color. It goes back to the curatorial practices. Things are designed. Things in the city are designed, down to the homes being designed. And it's funny because if you look back at the city's history, it was not designed for people of color (Fuck you, Robert Moses).

The people make the city, and they make me. I am a mosaic of everybody I've ever met before, especially the people of color who opened my eyes. I mean, I grew up in a very mixed household. Okay, back on topic to the question. I made that video. I wanted to represent everything that my summer looked like, even down to the joy. I wanted the joy to be represented the most.

I was like, fuck this. I'm not making anything sad. I made that video, and I was like, this is beautiful. And then I put the song Be On Your Way by Daughter, because there's a lyric that resonates with me to this day: I won't hold you back. Time throws us around. And there is never just one future. Our lifetime dreams aren't bound. And I look at things like this. I mean, we're shooting a podcast episode right now. It's like there is nothing that bounds us to anything. No matter how much society tries to [put] pressure on that narrative that you need to hustle and you can only be this one thing. So, I put those videos together and made a compilation to present. Bringing those two or three videos together reminded me of why nothing bad ever lasts long. When you are at home with people who make home a beautiful place, it's revolutionary. To keep your home a safe place, especially in the very interesting year of 2026. Our current administration is trying to strip people of color of their rights. Without a doubt. So, we revolutionize; we take that curatorial practice we've learned from our parents and start to do it for ourselves. And I mean, it's videos; it becomes exhibitions; it becomes an archive. I don't think people recognize just how many recipe books we make without there ever being a full recipe. It is so important to keep that archive alive and ever-growing. It's important. So those videos are why I chose that for this exhibition, and thank you again.

Logan Robinson: There was a writer named Imani Davis. They were telling me about a manuscript they were writing on why America decides to capitalize, or American media decides to capitalize off of Black pain and not so often Black joy. I thought that was a really interesting concept. And I still think about that to this day. It was like two years ago at this point, and it kind of flipped a switch in my brain. I was like, wait a minute. I don't want to be sad. I don't want to represent sadness anymore. I mean, I'm already doing that in my poetry. These books are miserable. Obviously, the duality of humanity- I contain multitudes, you know, the whole thing.

That really just flipped a switch in my brain, and I wasn't ready at the time to start representing that joy. As time progressed, I just met a lot of people. I mean, Heaven, for example, who just exuded joy and wanted community. And that kind of circled back to me, and I was like, wait a minute, this is fucking awesome. I don't want to be sad. I love black joy more than anything in this world. People don't realize it because I don't outwardly say it.

I love the idea of collaging. A lot of times it's singular pictures, but when you have a bunch of things staring at you, it's like you discover something new every time, especially because collages can have writing and have different things that you don't notice each time. It's like how we rediscover photo books in a way. I have a photo book from when I was a baby, and I often rediscover it every four to five years. It's nice to see that my family kept those moments, but I discover something new every time, and I think as collaging hopefully, especially in BIPOC communities, becomes more popular, I hope it carries that same legacy of rediscovering photo books, rediscovering something new in a collage you've never seen before.

queen carrasco: I'd really love it if you could speak on what home means to you, including how that influences your work and the ways that you see it.

Logan Robinson: Honestly, thank you for that question. That is one of my favorite things to answer. I'm gay, a person of color, and also very young. I live in a time where home has become sort of digitized and sort of romanticized. And I love the romanticism of home, but I also love the nuances of home. So, for me, I started looking at home as making a safe space for other people. I want to be. I didn't. I was bullied growing up. I was a heavier kid. It was a lot for a young kid to bear. And I never want to represent that to people who don't deserve it, which is like the majority.

A lot of people are just finding their way. And if I can be that thing people return to and find some sort of safety or comfort in, then I feel like I'm representing home. Home is revolutionary. For my final history essay last semester, I wrote about how relaxation is revolutionary, especially in BIPOC communities, because it's often promoted for people of color to just work, work, work, work. They are not awarded the same opportunities as white people, so it always has to be hustle culture. But what happens when you recognize that there needs to be equality?

But also, what happens when you recognize that you also deserve to rest as a person of color? Where do you fit into that narrative of just relaxing? I mean, so many people work so hard until their eighties and nineties. Some people, they just never stop because they believe that's the American dream. It's not. It's not. People of color deserve relaxation, deserve to rest, deserve to sleep, and be motivated the same way that white people are when their mental health is disintegrating right before their eyes. It's never just no. You need to take a step back and cool down. It's always, "You'll be fine, just keep going." And I do think that influences the home, too. I think a lot of hustle culture is very anti-Black.

It does not allow for home. It only allows work, constant work, constant switching the goalposts to another unnecessary achievement. It never gives them space to exist and relax, especially black people. I mean, hustle culture is so anti-Black, and I will die on that hill.

Logan Robinson: But for me, it is revolutionary to be at home and create spaces for other people to do that. Because we're all learning together, aren't we? We're just a bunch of young people in a world where you have to know everything before you get the chance to learn anything. So, if I'm getting academic for a moment, the only way I can learn is if other people learn with me, and I will open that space up as vastly and as emotionally and as much as I am capable of, even as I progress beyond maybe artistry and years to come.

queen carrasco: I like that statement a lot. As we're wrapping up, who inspires you in your practice?

Logan Robinson: I love Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keita. He [Keita] was doing something so expansive, and then it furthered into family portraits. And that's another curatorial practice. Film was so expensive at that time, especially in Bamako. And everybody wanted family photos. So, they would dress up to take these family photos because they wanted their legacy to be remembered. And I mean, even if it wasn't fully dressed up, it inspires me to make sure that I'm capturing those grander candids and/or stylized candids, but also nuanced candids.

I think there's beauty in that because we're not stylized for that. We're dressed comfortably. We want our work to represent what we made. Seydou Keita inspires me to capture black joy and grief and all those things in candids / candidly. And I want to be intentional with everything I photograph and everything people see. I want to learn intentionality and teach it as I commit to the act of it. I will never take that inspiration for granted, especially as a writer too. I mean, it is so important to be happy with what you made versus what you think other people would be happy with. There are so many ways of articulating yourself. You get lost in the sauce and forget what made you happy in the first place.

queen carrasco: Any future works that we should be looking forward to?

Logan Robinson: You know, it's funny because I want to say nothing is coming, but that would quite literally spoil everything. I guess I can just talk about it. I don't really care.

queen carrasco: Give us the 30 seconds that you feel are most important

Logan Robinson: New album - grungy dark metal, dark pop. New book in four years. Later  I'll release it, I'm sure. It's archival. It's beautiful. It's already very joyful and quite queer, to be honest with you. Also photography. It happens on its own. I'll never stop photographing.

queen carrasco: Logan Robinson, thank you for being here.

Logan Robinson: Queen. Thank you so much for having me. This is an honor, and I'm so grateful. Thank you.


This is Warden's 'In Conversation' [series], where we go in depth with artists that we featured in our curatorial shows and just worked with in general to talk about their practice, their work, and whatever really motivates them. This excerpt comes from an interview with Logan Robinson on August 20th, 2026. Full transcript coming soon.