Tra` Slaughter (b. 1975, Freeport, TX) is a Houston-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice fuses oil painting, mixed-media assemblage, text, and large-scale public murals to excavate the shared psychology of everyday life.
Raised in rural South Texas, Slaughter moved to Houston in 2000 to earn his B.A. in Graphic Design at the Art Institute of Houston (’02) before pivoting to full-time studio work a decade later.
His formative influences — Salvador Dali, Jackson Pollock, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Egon Schiele, and Charlie Isoe—surface in a raw mark-making language and a palette that vacillates between raucous pop hues and muted, weather-worn textures.
Self-taught in painting, Slaughter treats art “as necessary as water and air,” a therapeutic counterweight to lived experience with bipolar disorder and single fatherhood. That candor fuels community-facing projects: he co-founded a Houston-based non-profit 501(c)(3) in 2018, granting emergency relief and free mental-health services to creatives (Tra` stepped away from the non-profit in 2022 to focus on his artwork and other creative endeavors). He still frequently partners with veteran-support nonprofits.
Over the past nine years he has completed more than 30 murals across Houston—including traffic-box “Mini Murals,” warehouse façades, City Hall murals, private home murals, and civic installations. houstonmuralmap.com Gallery highlights include Ao5 Gallery ao5gallery.com (Austin), Reeves Art + Design reevesartgalleryhouston.com (Houston), and numerous pop-up exhibitions supporting mental-health advocacy.
Today Slaughter’s studio output ranges from 6-foot figurative canvases to limited-edition prints. Whether layering scripture fragments, song lyrics, or child-like scrawls, each work detonates with what he calls “visual journaling”—a plea for radical empathy in a fractured culture.
In addition to his fine art and murals, Tra` also recently created a new apparel brand, ‘Word to Your Wardrobe’ with his daughter, Harper. “Slangwear” focused on slang words/phrases from the 80s - thru the 2020s. They will be officially launching Summer ‘25.
