Photos by Riley Ansa
Sol Diaz-Peña is a Cuban-Mexican-American, transdisciplinary artist, educator, and organizer. Their practice explores identity, cultural memory, and collective storytelling at the intersection of migration, queerness, and the power of returning to nature. Working across painting, photography, and public practice, they draw from Zapotec Indigenous traditions, gender-variant lineages, and family archives to explore movement across territories as a living bond with the land and inherited histories. Their work attends to the fluid, negotiated nature of self-determined identities
Sol Díaz-Peña es unx artista, educadorx y organizadorx transdisciplinar de ascendencia cubana, mexicana y estadounidense. Su práctica explora la identidad, la memoria cultural y la narración colectiva en la intersección entre la migración, la rareza y el poder de volver a la naturaleza. Trabajando entre la pintura, la fotografía y la práctica pública, se inspira en las tradiciones indígenas zapotecas, los linajes de género variante y los archivos familiares para explorar el movimiento a través de territorios como un vínculo vivo con la tierra y las historias heredadas. Su obra atiende a la naturaleza fluida y negociada de las identidades autodeterminadas.
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Diaz-Peña has exhibited at Lawndale Art Center, Blaffer Art Museum, and Project Row Houses, with work featured in New American Paintings No. 174. They have held residencies at Lawndale Art Center, Project Row Houses, the Artists’ Literacy Institute (NY), and Glitch Lab with Edgelands Institute and received the 2024 Arts and Media Award from the Houston Transgender Unity Committee.
Since 2022, Diaz-Peña has co-organized OpenMFA, participating in the collective’s residency at Asia Society Texas Center and its inclusion in the 2024 Texas Biennial. In 2025, OpenMFA received The Idea Fund award for Absurd Classroom, a project led by Diaz-Peña. They are also a core member of Kitchen Table Puppets + Press, which toured the large-scale puppet performance Recipes of Resistance in Spring 2025 in partnership with ACLU Texas.
Diaz-Peña holds a B.A. in Humanities with a focus in Critical Race Studies from the University of Houston–Downtown.
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Thank you!