My Story: Creativity, Purpose & Legacy
This Was Definitely Not the Plan
My story is complicated, messy, sometimes painful, sometimes funny, and definitely not what I had planned. But somehow, all of it brought me here.
The Beginning
If you had told teenage me that one day I’d be running businesses, leading a nonprofit, finishing college, and writing a book about all of this, I probably would have laughed at you. Actually, depending on what year you caught me, I might not have been available for the conversation.
My life has never followed a straight path.
I survived childhood trauma, sexual abuse, rape as a teenager, domestic violence, juvenile detention, jail boot camp, prison and circumstances that could have taken my life in a completely different direction.
By 18, I was in prison. My first-ever plane ride was in shackles after I was apprehended in Cleveland, which, for the record, is not how I recommend traveling. 😂
For a long time, I thought some of those parts of my life were things I needed to leave behind or explain away. Eventually, I realized they were simply part of my story, not the whole story.
I had to learn how to survive long before I ever had the chance to just be a kid. I learned how to keep going, how to figure things out, and eventually how to create something different for myself.
My Father's Legacy
Long before I understood entrepreneurship, I was being raised around it.
My father started a small sign business from our home when I was about four or five years old. I grew up watching him work, riding alongside him, learning how signs were made, and seeing firsthand what it meant to use your own skills to support your family. My father was also a gun dealer, he would flip cars, he would shoot pool and play poker and make good money doing it. Later I learned he had been a private detective, installed security systems when he lived in New York and so much more. A true hustler in every way. He was one of those people who always seemed to know how to do something and he taught me.
Creativity and ambition definitely runs in my family. My grandfather, James Martin Triggs, was an illustrator and engraver who created detailed aviation and technical artwork. He worked for Ruger for 40 years, engraved firearms, and created illustrations for Gun Digest and other publications.
Looking back, I probably inherited my dad's inability to stick to just one thing. Signs, photography, nonprofits, marketing, writing… apparently, I like options. 😂 I also went to school for medical assisting and phlebotomy and worked in the medical field for a short time, and a variety of other random odd jobs... There were also chapters of my life that looked very different from the one I’m living now including a period when I was a stripper while on the run.
In 2005, when I was 28, my dad was hospitalized after a hip injury. Three days later, we found out he had Stage 4 cancer. A month later, he was gone.
I was grieving my father, raising a new baby, and suddenly responsible for Art & Sign Corporation, the small sign business he had started from our home when I was very little.
I knew how to make signs. I knew how to letter, install, create, and work with my hands because I had grown up beside him, tagging along to everything from lettering planes, to installing signs.
What I did not know was how to actually run a business.
I learned through trial, error, customers, bills, mistakes, long days, and a whole lot of figuring things out as I went, but I didn't give up.
More than 21 years later, the skills my father taught me are still part of my life and my business. What began as his small family sign company eventually grew into the creative work I do today through Tara Michele Studio, bringing together custom signs, graphics, printing, displays, branding, marketing, and adding in photography in 2015.
I didn’t simply inherit a business.
I inherited a foundation.
And I built on it.
Motherhood Changed Everything
Motherhood changed the direction of my life in ways I couldn’t have understood at the time. In 2005 I had my first child and three more after in the six years following that. I did not exactly enter motherhood with some perfectly organized plan. I learned as I went.
Over the years, raising my children has taught me patience, advocacy, determination, flexibility, and how to keep functioning even when life feels completely overwhelming.
Motherhood also pushed me into spaces I never expected to be in. Navigating disability, education, services, healthcare, and advocacy for my own family eventually became part of what led me to create ThisAbility.
My children have seen me build businesses, lose things, start over, go back to school, take risks, make mistakes, and keep going. And somewhere in all of that, they have been growing right alongside me.
Now I’m also a grandmother, which still feels slightly ridiculous to say out loud because in my head I’m clearly not old enough for that.
Being a mother is not the only part of who I am, but it has shaped almost every version of me that came after it. The amount of love I have for them in indescribable.
Creativity Was Always There
Creativity has followed me through every chapter of my life.
Drawing and poetry gave me a way to express things I didn’t always know how to say. Even in prison, creativity became a way for me to cope and make something out of the situation I was in. I drew pictures for other women and sold them for canteen. Looking back, I guess entrepreneurship was going to find me one way or another.
Sign making kept me connected to my father’s legacy. Photography eventually gave me another way to tell stories and preserve moments.
In 2015, I started bringing photography together with the sign and creative work I had already been doing for years.
Today, Tara Michele Studio brings all of those pieces together.
I photograph people and important moments. I create signs, graphics, displays, branding, and marketing materials. I help entrepreneurs and organizations present who they are. And now, I also use what I’ve learned through years of business and nonprofit leadership to help other nonprofit founders build and strengthen organizations of their own.
On paper, some of those things probably look like they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. But to me, they do.
I’ve found a way to combine my natural creativity and the things I’m passionate about with almost every part of my life and work.
And somehow, something that started with a pencil, some paper, became part of the life I’ve built today.
Then Came the Founder in Me
What started as personal advocacy as a mother eventually became more than a decade of nonprofit leadership. In 2012, another major chapter of my life began when I founded ThisAbility.
What started from my own experiences navigating the world of disability grew into years of nonprofit leadership, programs, resources, partnerships, community events, and support for children and adults with disabilities and their families.
ThisAbility changed me just as much as I helped build it.
I learned nonprofit leadership by actually doing the work, developing programs, pursuing funding, building community partnerships, solving problems, fundraising, advocating, organizing events, creating resources, and figuring out how to keep an organization moving even when resources were limited.
And somewhere along the way, I learned there are about a hundred things nobody tells you before you decide to start a nonprofit. 😂
Eventually, I decided to strengthen that hands-on experience with formal education and professional training.
Today, I am a Certified Nonprofit Professional (CNP), I have professional training in Grant Writing and Entrepreneurship, and I am completing my bachelor’s degree in Public Administration with a minor in Psychology through Liberty University.
After more than 14 years of nonprofit leadership and more than 21 years in business, I now use what I’ve learned to help other nonprofit founders and leaders avoid some of the confusion, mistakes, and trial and error I had to work through myself.
That work has grown into nonprofit consulting, mentorship, funding research, organizational support, educational resources, branding, and marketing services. LEARN MORE ABOUT THISABILITY
What I’ve Learned Along the Way
For a long time, different pieces of my life felt disconnected.
The difficult childhood.
The mistakes I made when I was young.
Prison.
Domestic Violence.
Losing my father.
Becoming a business owner before I felt prepared.
Motherhood.
Advocacy.
Building a nonprofit.
Photography.
Writing.
Going back to school.
Starting over again and again.
Now I can see how much one chapter prepared me for another.
My past taught me that I could survive hard things and still choose what came next.
My father taught me entrepreneurship.
My mother taught me compassion.
Motherhood taught me determination.
Advocacy taught me to use my voice.
Nonprofit leadership taught me service.
Business taught me how to create.
Education keeps challenging me to grow.
And life has taught me that very little happens in a straight line.
Some things happened to me. Some things were choices I made. Some things I would absolutely never choose to repeat. And some of them definitely fall into the category of, “Girl… what were you thinking?” 😂
But all of it became part of the person I am now.
And I’m still becoming.
Still Writing This Story
I’m nearing the end of writing the deeper version of my personal story, and it goes far beyond what can fit on an About page.
The book covers the road between the person I was, the woman I became, and the person I am still becoming.
It goes deeper into the childhood, the mistakes, prison, motherhood, losing my father, business, relationships, ThisAbility, starting over, and the things I’m still learning about myself along the way.
I’m not telling my story because I want people focused on where I’ve been.
I’m telling it because somebody else may be sitting in a chapter of their own life right now thinking that chapter is going to define everything that comes after it.
It doesn’t have to.
You can make mistakes and still change direction.
You can lose things and still build again.
You can start over more than once.
And apparently, you can think you’re almost finished writing a book and keep remembering more things you probably should include. 😂
My past is part of my story, but it isn’t the whole story.
And I’m still writing the rest.
The story isn’t finished. Neither am I.
The Man Who Started It All
The Life and Legacy of My Dad, James Michael “Mike” Triggs & the legacy he began in 1980 Art & Sign Corp
On an early August morning in 2005, I woke up to the words no one is ever prepared to hear.
“He’s not breathing.”
That was the morning I lost my dad.
Cancer had taken him from us. Less than a year before, he had gotten a defibrillator because his heart was only functioning at 30 percent. He had already survived a five-way bypass in 1992. His heart didn’t take him out, so cancer did.
Most people knew him as Mike, and some of his fellow gun dealers called him “Damn Yankee.”
At that moment, the man whose hands had painted signs, lettered vehicles, created artwork and built a business was gone. The man who had taught me to shoot a gun, snake a toilet, play tonk, shoot pool, play chess and who held my hand and rubbed my forehead to help me fall asleep when I was a child was gone.
I was in disbelief. I still needed my dad.
I would later understand that everything he created and everything he passed down to me did not leave with him.
My dad was born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1945. He grew up with his brothers, Art and Robert. He was kicked out when he was around 16 years old, so he had to learn how to survive and take care of himself early.
He learned to shoot pool in New York during the 1960s. Growing up, I watched him earn a lot of money with his favorite pool cue. It was smooth, solid and perfectly balanced in his hands. He could walk into a poolroom, pick up that cue and make a moneymaking shot with a 38 in his back pocket.
Throughout his life, he always found different ways to make ends meet. He played poker at Ol’ Sarge’s house and Charlie Qs house, flipped cars and sold firearms. He worked several jobs over the years, including installing security systems in NY & DC, Bail enforcement agent, and he also spent some time in the Navy. I don't think there was much my dad didn't know how to do.
My parents met at the historic Wantagh Hotel on Long Island in 1970. My mom shared with me that they were there when the hotel caught fire. The Wantagh Hotel was destroyed by fire on December 19, 1970, and my dad helped get everyone safely out of the building.
Then again, he was the son of a fire captain.
My parents also worked as house parents at a group home for teenage boys in Riverdale, Maryland, during the 1970s.
Years later, one of the young men who lived there, Chris Weber, found me online by chance. Chris told me that my dad had been his guardian for several years. Chris was a young aspiring sketch artist, and my dad took him under his wing, put a paintbrush in his hands and taught him how to paint with acrylics.
Chris shared this with me:
“I learned a lot from Mike. He was a multifaceted individual, and we spent a lot of time together, talking into the wee hours of the morning. He took a special interest in me and took a lot of time to educate me on so many life lessons.”
That meant a lot to me. My dad did more than supervise the kids in his care. He spent time with them, listened to them and taught them things they carried into adulthood. All those years later, Chris still remembered the time, attention and creativity my dad shared with him. Over the years I saw my dad take in other teens and help them as well.
After moving from New York to the D.C. and Maryland area and then to Virginia, Dad turned his talent into a business.
His artistry began long before, but his business began in 1980, he established Art & Sign Corp. in Hopewell, Virginia. Where he dominated the sign business in that area for many years.
This was before computers and digital printers changed the sign business. Everything was painted and lettered by hand. I grew up watching my dad screen print, paint signs and letter trucks, boats and aircraft. I was there when he switched to computers and vinyl too.
He lettered police cars, fire trucks and emergency vehicles for Hopewell, Prince George, Kenbridge, Colonial Heights, Waverly and other surrounding communities. He painted murals and created signs for businesses and organizations throughout the area.
His work included everything from storefronts and construction signs to boats, work trucks and emergency vehicles. He even created a hand painted “Support Our Troops, Operation Desert Storm” banner that appeared in the Hopewell News in 1991.
One newspaper article credited “the lettering by Michael Triggs with Art and Sign” as the final touch on an emergency vehicle local business prepared and donated to the American Red Cross. Another photograph captured my dad and my brother Danny installing a sign for the Hopewell Technology Enterprise Center.
My mom was part of Art & Sign too. One newspaper photograph shows her painting a special-order picture of a ram and identifies her as an owner of the company. Art & Sign really was part of our family.
Every line, letter and design came from my dads own hands. His own creative mind.
Looking through these old photographs, I can see just how proud my dad was of his work and the business he built. And he should have been. He started with his talent, his hands and the determination to make a living for his family.
Art & Sign Corp. was more than a business to him. It was something he created from the ground up. Every finished sign painted vehicle and completed job carried a piece of him.
My dad did not just make signs. He was a real artist.
These are a few of the paintings my dad left behind to a friend of his Big Dan. His talent went far beyond signs and lettering. He painted military aircraft, scenes connected to the Vietnam War and other subjects that interested him. One painting is marked “ARVN Fuel Depot, Qui Nhon, Aug. 12 ’69,” while another is titled “Trophy.”
I am grateful these pieces are still here. They allow people to see the talent I grew up watching.
Creativity runs deep in our family. For generations.
My grandfather, James Martin Triggs, was also a gifted artist. (google him you won't be disappointed.) His work included commercial gun and aviation illustration and detailed firearm artwork, including engraving. He worked for Ruger for 40 years.
That artistic ability was passed down to him from his father Lawrence Triggs, who was a writer, advertising executive, layout/graphic designer, and crossword-puzzle creator; later worked for Kodak, then to my father, and my father passed it down to me and me down to my own children. My brother Mike who is no longer with us was an artist as well.
We used different tools and created different things, but creativity connects us. It started with my ancestors, and continued through my dad’s paintings, signs and vehicle lettering, and now lives through my pencil drawings, photography, graphics, designs and creative thinking.
My dad was always finding a way to make money. He was smart, resourceful and definitely not the kind of person who could be described with just one title.
Almost every weekend, we traveled across Virginia to gun shows. I tagged along and helped him sell guns. Those trips were another part of my life with my dad. I watched him work, talked to people alongside him and learned from the way he could walk into almost any room and handle business.
He also had a wild sense of humor and loved flirting with the ladies. He could be an ass at times he gave me the gift of sarcasm. If you knew Mike, there is a good chance you heard him say something that could not be repeated in polite company. Lol. He could make people laugh, shock an entire room and leave people with stories they would continue telling for years.
My dad struggled with drinking during part of his life. When he got sober, he dragged me to plenty of AA meetings with him. That is also where I discovered I would not be becoming an alcoholic. after hearing all those stories. It is also where I discovered the phrase "shit happens" and I still use it to this day.
I do not want to leave that part out because it was part of his story, but it was not the end of his story.
He got sober and stayed sober for the rest of his life.
My dad was not perfect, and I would never try to tell his story as if he was. His life was complicated, colorful, sometimes difficult and definitely unforgettable. He was adventurous, and he was completely unfiltered.
He was an artist, a survivor, a businessman, a hustler, a father and a man who found the strength to change his life.
Most importantly, he always showed up for me.
Before he died, my dad was able to meet my first child. Knowing that they shared even that short amount of time together means more to me than I can put into words. My child may not remember being held by him, but I will always remember that my dad got to know his grandson before he left us.
Today, I continue his legacy through Tara Michele Studio, but he gave me more than just a business legacy. He gave me my creativity, my determination and my ability to figure things out even when shit hits the fan.
The name of the business has changed, and the tools we use are different now, but the spirit behind the work is still the same.
My work did not begin with a computer, a camera or a business plan. It began with me watching my dad create things with his own two hands.
His work is still here. His stories are still being told. His creativity still lives through me.
Every time I create, I carry a piece of him with me.
After he died, my Uncle Art & I took his ashes to the Adirondack Mountains and spread them at Thirteenth Lake where he and his brothers would visit as a child. It was a beautiful place for his final journey and a place where part of him will always remain.
He became part of the mountains, the water and the place where he now rests. But the rest of him is still here. He is in the stories we tell, the things I create and the family he was able to meet before he left us.
Happy belated heavenly birthday, Dad.
A gift passed down through generations. A legacy still being created.
Tara
Tara Michele Studio
Carrying forward the Art & Sign legacy
Creativity since 1980
Art & Sign Corp
