This National Coming Out Day, join artist Sol Díaz-Peña in reimagining “Picture Day” as a playful space for collective self-expression. Craft wearable pieces using cyanotype, craft materials, and fabric to creatively challenge how queer and gender-nonconforming people are labeled, watched, or monitored, while celebrating our authenticity as an act of resistance.

Whether in a crafted costume, a personal creation from home, or simply dressed as your most authentic self, you’re invited to capture your portrait against a custom backdrop created by the artist and include it in a Here Forever and Today collection of resistance.

Through photography, dialogue, and hands-on making, we will ask: How do we want to be seen in a surveillance state? How and when do we unmask, not because we’re forced to, but for connection, expression, and on our own terms? Be part of transforming costumes into a living archive of resistance, reflection, and joy. 

This event is free and open to all, with materials provided. Space is limited, arrive on time to secure your spot!

This project is part of Glitch Lab, a new residency by the Edgelands Institute and the NOTICE Coalition, in which Sol Diaz-Peña is a current artist-in-residence,  developing socially engaged art projects exploring how surveillance technologies—such as student activity monitoring software, AI-powered cameras, and vape detectors—are reshaping education and youth justice.

About the Artist:

Sol Diaz-Peña is a Cuban-Mexican-American, transdisciplinary artist, educator, and organizer in Houston, TX. 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. As a whole, their work attends to the fluid, negotiated nature of self-determined identity.

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, and the Artists’ Literacy Institute (NY), and received the 2024 Arts and Media Award from the Houston Transgender Unity Committee.