Remember Me: Musing on Birds by Zia Daugherty
Positive Space Tulsa
through October 24, 2026
In her first solo exhibition, Tulsa-based painter Zia Daugherty delivers both a detailed look at the colorful compositions of birds and a thoughtful examination of humanity’s ominous relationship with the natural world. She created the works in Remember Me: Musing on Birds in the span of eight months, working mostly with oils. The medium takes a long time to dry, which allowed her space to sit with her thoughts as she developed the concept for her next piece. Daugherty's show invites us into that musing time, allowing us to alight (like her subjects) on one painting, gather sustenance, and move to the next carrying fresh insight.
Approaching the show clockwise, I spent the most time examining Nature, Preserved, in which a bouquet of birds the artist saw while visiting Oxley Nature Center displays their colorful palettes in various poses of perch and flight. “Why do we think of nature as something ‘over there,’ contained within an allotted space with invisible barriers?” the artist asks in her accompanying wall label.
For many—like the Gen Z folks discovering birding for the first time—birds serve as a primary connection to the natural world, one of the few wild creatures we regularly encounter regardless of where we live. “They do not conform to borders, fences or walls. The bird you see on a power line in the summer may be the same bird that will fly to South America in the winter,” writes the artist, setting up her subjects as ecological barometers of the issues highlighted in each painting that affect our shared earth.
In seven oil-painted panels of endangered birds of North America, the Golden-Cheeked Warbler stood out with its bright little head contrasted against its dark shoulders. It flew into the rest of the endangered flock at 7” x 5”, looking for juniper woods in which to nest. (All of the bird cut-outs are made to scale.) Unfortunately, many of these wooded areas are being cleared for our food and homes, leaving the warbler with no place to land. “These birds aren’t gone. Not yet. They deserve to be here,” Daugherty notes. Since most of us won’t see these birds in our lifetime, she decided to bring them into being in the most realistic way she knew how.
Daugherty takes her time to make sure each bird is accurately represented in her paintings, creating a permanent record of groups that are swiftly leaving our planet. More than 50 percent of the world’s migratory bird species are declining, giving these artworks a status of visual archive much like the watercolor paintings of John James Audubon two centuries ago. Unlike Audubon, this artist did not need to kill her subjects to study their features, thanks to the advent of modern photography.