The complex art, and life, of Minnesota's Robert Taliaferro, Jr.
Every piece of art has a story, as does every artist. And southern Minnesota artist Robert Taliaferro, Jr. has a story that proves, in the most extreme way, that people are complex.
Art is one of Taliaferro's many talents. He's an artist to the core.
"My first childhood memory, I grew up in the projects of Pittsburgh, and we grew up poor. I grew up in St. Clair Village. The place where I grew up doesn't even exist anymore," Taliaferro said. "I used to sit up there and we used to sketch and draw Snoopy and dropped Charlie Brown and all that, and we'd compete with each other."
He said his first exhibition was at age 14 at Pittsburgh's Selma Park Burke Art Center. Taliaferro has a knack for writing, too. He's an award-winning journalist with several degrees, and a reputation for service.
"United States Army basic training at Fort Dixon, New Jersey," he said.
His resume is long, especially when you consider he spent most of his life — 38.5 years — in Minnesota's Stillwater prison. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 1984.
Taliaferro said he's only talked to a few people about the day it happened.
"And one of the things that I looked at at that particular time and said, OK, I need to change the perspective of who I am as an individual. I need to change the perspective of who I am as a human being. I need to sit up there and stop lying to myself and to others. And the only way that I can do that is to say, OK, stop making excuses, stop blaming other people. So here's what I'm going to do, and I laid it out then, I said, I'm going to Stillwater, Minnesota, they got the inside college program up there, and I'm going to go in, and I'm going to go to school, I'm going to get a college degree and go from there," he said.
And he did just that, thriving in prison leadership, being interviewed by Time Magazine about his work with The Mirror, a prison publication. He also kept painting.
"I did a sketch. It was, it was the most important thing, I think. I did a sketch or a painting or a drawing nearly daily," he said. "It was a way of just, I say it was a way of escape. It was a way of sitting up there and saying, 'OK, I'm not here anymore. I'm walking in Paris, France. I'm walking the same street as Degas.'"
He mentored prisoners, worked for an outside newspaper, too, and served his time, being released in 2022.
When asked about what he wished people better understood about prisoners, Taliaferro said, "Look in the mirror."
"I want to make sure that the life that was lost wasn't in vain, and I don't know for sure, but I'm thinking I saved a few lives. I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure that I have saved a lot more lives in the process, over the last 38-and-a-half years, from working with folks inside, you know, working with people that were organization members and people that wanted to kill each other because they wore the different color clothes," he said.
His work now is to make society better serve those who serve. Alongside a room of talented fellow veteran artists at the Minneapolis VA, he showcases his painting entitled "Sarge," which won first place and best in show in the National Veterans Creative Arts Competition.
"'Sarge' is one of the few paintings where I don't have him looking at you. He had that 'thousand-yard stare' that people used to say," Taliaferro said. "And I kind of wanted people to say, 'OK, what's he looking at? What's he seeing?'"
Taliaferro is super busy, with his next big project being a collaboration on the Austin Community Warming Center in Austin, Minnesota. He says it's so important to remember homelessness happens in rural areas, too.
His book of art, "Always Color Outside the Lines," is available on Amazon and eBay.