Creative Communion: Trueson and Zia Daugherty’s art of living
Trueson and Zia Daugherty commune with artists at their home for The Salón
PHOTOGRAPH BY VIỆT H. NGUYỄN
It’s a cool Saturday morning. Still a little sleepy, a couple dozen people step through the little back gate of Trueson and Zia Daugherty’s midtown Tulsa home—one carrying a painting, another a guitar. Several have poems in their phones, handmade zines in their pockets. Zia greets them as they grab cups of coffee and meander into a space stuffed with cushions and chairs and decorated like a Victorian sitting room, the morning sun glowing on its mustard yellow walls, which are often hung with work by local artists like Bradford Lovett and Dan Rocky.
As the arrival bustle dies down, Trueson steps onto a wooden box beside an antique harpsichord. He calls for attention, but not just in the sense of “silence.” Attention, he says, is one of the most valuable things we have to give.
One by one, as people come up to the soapbox to share what they’re creating (three minutes at a time, measured by an hourglass), the assembled group’s gaze bathes each of them in a different sort of glow—an invigorating warmth that everyone carries with them when they walk back into the everyday world.
This is The Salón, which artists Trueson and Zia host six times a year at their house (dubbed, for these occasions, The Parlour). You never know who’ll show up, and the unpredictable mix is part of the magic. For well-known Tulsa artists like Scott Bell and Skip Hill as well as people who’ve never shared their work in public at all, The Salón has become a consistent, welcoming hub for real-life community among the city’s creatives.
If it sounds a little bit like “art church,” that’s no accident. “As a person who’s not really into religion, I recognize the need for ceremony,” Trueson says. “I recognize the need for ritual and mythology and the beyond and mystery. I yearn for those things.”
Trueson’s own work often draws from, interrogates and remixes religious and mythic iconography. Zia, who by day restores religious art and statuary for F. C. Ziegler Co., is an award-winning illustrator and painter whose “Backyard Hues” was featured in the 2024 Mayfest Heart of Tulsa gallery. Both have associates degrees in art and were raised in the Unification Church, where they were joined in an arranged marriage. Now, no longer members of the church, these 33-year-olds are creating new sanctuaries where the vulnerability, risk and effort at the heart of making art can be normalized, lifted up and shared.
In artistic temperament and practice, they couldn’t be more different—or more admiring of each other’s uniqueness. It’s a combination of qualities that their “social sculpture” practice in The Salón reflects and encourages.
Zia’s work—whether historically informed art restoration, her own painting or even the murder mysteries she writes for friends—is methodically planned and meticulously researched. “I’m notoriously slow. I like things to be accurate,” she says. “I feel like ‘a painter,’ not ‘an artist,’ because I don’t have the artist brain that I hear people talk about where it’s like, ‘I need to put everything I’m feeling and thinking on the canvas and be creating constantly.’”
PHOTOGRAPH BY LOGAN MILLER
Trueson works more on instinct: sometimes it’s a “Creative Spirit” (a mask made with pom poms and googly eyes), sometimes a full-scale painting. “I’ll start painting on a canvas before I even know what I’m going to do,” he says. “If only we could combine our powers and I could have her skill and my confidence!”
Zia’s commercial art job means she doesn’t feel the pressure to make a living from her painting, though it’s her goal to have a solo show before too long. After years working in graphic and UX design, Trueson now makes art full-time. He’s branching out into performance art, public art (like his sculpture “Blazing Wings of Dreams” for Tulsa’s Phoenix District) and offerings like The Channel, an interview series with local creatives co-hosted with Prince Ferrell and produced by Pop House.
“If only we could combine our powers and I could have her skill and my confidence!”
But the Daughertys have some key things in common, besides their mutual respect for each other’s work and process. Zia, who’s been painting and drawing since childhood, is the niece of Chris Rodgers, herself a retired religious-art restorer, and the granddaughter of the late Bob Bartholic, a legend in the Tulsa arts world. Art was a vital part of Trueson’s young life, too; he regularly visited museums with his family and took his first college-level art class at 16.
They’ve shown work together at places like Untitled Art in Miami, and even created paintings together. One recent joint piece “was almost like a puzzle,” Zia remembers, with each of them working on different parts at different times. It’s a stunning canvas full of bold perspectives and contrasts, in which Tulsa artist Karl Jones posed for the figure of the fire-bringer Prometheus, beset by an eagle whose political symbolism was very much intentional.
As largely self-trained artists, the Daughertys have been inspired by Tulsans including Jones, Parker D. Wayne, Neil Wade and Kalup Linzy, who are shifting local arts discourse around issues such as gatekeeping through organizations like the Center for Queer Prairie Studies, Oklahoma Fashion Alliance, Black Queer Tulsa and Queen Rose Art House. (One artist who recently brought a painting to The Salón, Kiero Petross, just presented his first solo show at Queen Rose.)
“We saw these people living these amazing lives full of diversity and beauty and authenticity,” Trueson remembers. “And it really changed us. But I felt like the straight person co-opting this culture that’s rich and interesting. I don’t want to be taking up space, you know? As an artist, I have that same sense of [needing] community, a way to express, and a way for us to see each other. That accountability helps us encourage each other.”
With art at the heart of both their lives, the Daughertys also share a vision for the future—one that involves creating more of their own work, continuing their commitment to environmental and political justice and building more opportunities for creative Tulsans to come together.
“Artists don’t always know how to find each other in a way that’s not just a crowded art gallery,” Zia says. “Creating space for those people—artists, art buyers, appreciators—to mingle in a very natural setting: more of that would be amazing.”
“I would love to find ways to empower artists beyond just the Salón,” Trueson says. Among other ideas, he envisions a social club where membership would provide access to workshops, critique sessions, regular one-on-one dialogue with other members—and, of course, gatherings simply to enjoy each other’s company.
To conclude The Salón, Trueson often quotes Martha Graham’s famous words: “There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time. This expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”
At the end of the day, the work of art-making—sometimes lonely, competitive, intimidating, discouraging—is profoundly individual. But it thrives in community, where people can find support and experience more approaches to creative living than they might currently give themselves permission to explore. In their marriage, their art and their social practice, the Daughertys exemplify the power of being oneself—and doing it together.