BRATTLEBORO-“Step into the world of Tape Art Mega Corp. (TAMC), where creativity meets corporate chaos — and everyone’s hired on the spot.”
So opens a recent press release from Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC). While an empty office suite on the first floor of 28 Vernon St. awaits BMAC’s future plans, it will become, from March 21 to 29, the site of TAMC’s latest installation: a bustling new “corporate headquarters” created “from top to bottom using nothing but imagination and rolls of colorful tape.”
And we’re all invited to help build it.
For those nine days starting this Saturday, artists Michael Townsend and Leah Smith will lead this “part immersive installation, part comedy, and all-community artmaking” event.
The duo, based in Providence, Rhode Island, promise a “playful, participatory art experience” as visitors of all ages “clock in for a shift to play, create, and laugh together as they help build a world out of tape” — anything and everything from cubicles to trophies “in this workplace gone wonderfully off the rails.”
Exclusively using rolls of tape as their medium to transform everyday walls into large-scale temporary murals, Townsend and Smith have created public art in communities across the United States and beyond.
Townsend’s work is earning a wide audience through a 2024 documentary, Secret Mall Apartment. The film, now streaming on Netflix, chronicles how he and several other artists clandestinely created and kept an apartment in a nook they discovered deep in the structure of Providence Place.
That supersized shopping haven built in 1999 had left many in Providence dismayed over its culture-eradicating impact. Hardly a hangout den, the apartment was where many Tape Art projects — and TAMC’s modus operandi — were hatched.
No stranger to quirky, Townsend started at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), earning a bachelor’s degree in printmaking in 1989 and soon became an instructor at the top-ranked art school. Townsend spoke recently with The Commons from his old Providence mill loft home.
‘Something happened right here’
Back in 1989, Townsend started developing Tape Art as, he says, “a collaborative [and temporary] method of making art.” Reflecting on its evolution, he recalls that one night early on, he and new first-year RISD friends began exploring “a city that was effectively abandoned because Providence was going through a big transition at that time. Our night ended with an urgent need to draw on the ground “some sort of shorthand” for their night’s experiences.
“We drew [in tape] a life-size person holding an 8-foot balloon [...] in a police silhouette outline style,” which, he observes, “is always a way of saying, ‘While you were asleep, something happened right here.’”
“The following night, before the sun came up, we went out and removed that drawing and put down a better drawing — life-size dinosaurs; 24 hours later, we ripped up that drawing and drew a chariot crash.”
And then, for months, “we just crashed things,” Townsend says.
“Crash a plane, crash a train, crash a roller coaster, crash Noah’s Ark. When it rained, we couldn’t draw on the ground, so we just moved it into covered spaces and did the same style, life-size silhouettes. Those became sort of living murals. And that’s how Tape Art started.”
Thirty-seven years later, Townsend — teamed with Smith for the last 15 years — is “the in-house Tape Art crew. We’re the travel team in an art ecosystem where not a lot of money is being passed around.” So they do “the international travel and the residency work where we go to a place and dig in for a while.”
The majority of their work, Townsend explains, “falls into big murals. That’s when we go park ourselves in front of a building and do a drawing that’s two or three stories high, 100 feet across. As a performance piece, we just draw all day. We did one of those on the front of [BMAC].”
‘Just so human’
BMAC director Danny Lichtenfeld describes the museum’s “special little history now growing” with TAMC, dating from a 2022 collaboration with ArtLords, refugees who’d been members of an art collective in their country of origin, Afghanistan.
“We met them soon after they came and started talking about supporting them and doing a mural project in their new hometown,” he says.
At the same time, Lichtenfeld continues, “BMAC was in conversation with Townsend and Smith about an installation.”
What resulted was a rich collaboration among all, through which 17 temporary murals were created around Brattleboro. At the close of that creative undertaking, BMAC committed to having the Tape Art team do a dedicated project “that really showcased what they do. So about a year later, they came for a few weeks and taped the whole museum blue,” Lichtenfeld recalls.
Townsend explains. “We were given the exterior of that building, a marvelously complex thing for us because we’re used to big blank walls. Give us brutalist architecture, we’re in heaven, right? But [BMAC] is just stones and mortar.”
They meticulously turned every stone blue, ensuring that the mortar remained clear. To honor the New Hampshire-sourced stones — which, he imagined, might have had yearnings to head graves — they drew on each a tiny vignette of a ground plane, a gravestone, a coffin or skeleton underground, a tree in a cloud.
That was repeated some 3,000 times, he adds.
“Just so human,” says Townshend.
Lichtenfeld elaborates on where the relationship with TAMC went from there. “Fast-forward: Now we’re friends, and Michael becomes the subject of this incredible documentary, Secret Mall Apartment, of which BMAC arranged a two-night showing at the Latchis, followed by a Q&A with Townsend and one of the film’s makers.”
When they were in town for the screenings, Lichtenfeld took them to the 28 Vernon St. space next door to the museum.
Townsend jumped.
“Oh, my god, we would love to do a project in here,” he said.
And so the idea was born to to take the very 1990s corporate-like office environment of 28 Vernon St., “and make it a crazy kooky office HQ kind of thing — all out of tape.”
“For nine days straight, Leah and I will be the managers from Tape Art Megacorp,” Townsend explains. “We’ll onboard people to give them a job for an hour or longer, if you want to stay.”
Lichtenfeld adds that “anyone is invited to just drop in and get swooped into this zany world of making things out of tape.”
The event will end Sunday, March 29, at 4 p.m., when “we’re going to have an office pizza party and tear all the tape down.”
A ‘wide-ranging performance piece about corporate culture’
The Brattleboro project is significant for TAMC because they’re running out of tape. The best product for their work, Townsend explains, was a painter’s tape manufacturer’s failure which, “accidentally, is the perfect drawing tape. I can’t overemphasize how narrow a spectrum of needs this tape has to fit in order to work well for drawing.”
To TAMC’s dismay, the company stopped making this tape four years ago.
“We bought up the last of it that exists on the planet. We’ve known that 2026 was going to be the year we would start to run out of it based on our regular tape usage. So as we sit here today, we’re looking at the last several hundred rolls.”
A quest for a new source in the U.S. — and in Europe and even in India — turned up no proper replacement, so the duo will head to China this summer to visit two or three factories a day, hoping to find one where “we’re praying that someone there either has it or is willing to help us develop it.”
Thus, the BMAC project “is a bit emotional for us,” says Townsend “because we’re going to be giving [the last of our] tape to the fine people who come to this installation. We want these last hundreds of rolls to have a really excellent impact.”
The aim, Townsend adds, is “to provide an opportunity to draw in a collaborative fashion that’s going to consume the interior of this administrative building. We just want to make sure that people have that deep sense of satisfaction that Tape Art can provide. Especially for people who don’t feel necessarily secure about making art. There’ll be a wild range of opportunities to make different types of things.
“We’ll have a lot of emergencies for things that need to be drawn ASAP, and they’ll be needs for advertisements and jingles and promotional campaigns and then a lot of in-house stuff we need […]. It’ll be a wide-ranging performance piece about corporate culture through the lens of making art.
“Leah and I have done a lot of corporate leadership training with high-end executives. We did a decade with General Electric. We worked with IBM. We worked with Siemens. We’ve been in the absolute trenches of using Tape Art as a tool to help executives understand their leadership journey.”
For the uninitiated, he adds that “the way you draw is you remove a strip of tape [6 inches to 2 feet long] which you can manipulate on the wall very easily. We’ll show everybody how to curve the tape and make it sculptural. As art educators, we spend a lot of time introducing Tape Art to new audiences. I personally have worked with over 60,000 first-time tape artists” in myriad demographics.
The therapeutic benefit of Tape Art, Townsend explains, “mostly comes from having the freedom to draw on surfaces that you would never get to draw on.”
The nice thing about Tape Art, he adds, “is that there’s not “a 1,000-, 2,000-year history of art backing it up,” so assessing quality is uncharted territory.
When asked about environmental impact, Tape Art assures: “the tape we use is made with recycled paper that is at its end-of-life, which means that it cannot be recycled any more since the fibers have been broken down too much from previous recycling processes.”
Reassurance is redoubled with the nature of the genre: “It’s always collaborative,” Townsend explains. “It’s always spontaneous. It always tells stories.”
That may be a happy antidote for these times.
A ‘gangbusters spring’
The TAMC project, Lichtenfeld explains, is part of a “gangbusters” spring, in which several other exhibits will be opening in BMAC galleries featuring artists from across the U.S. and from Costa Rica, all exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world.
In the last few years, Lichtenfeld adds, “we have sustained the highest levels of visitor attendance and participation in our programs that we’ve ever experienced.”
In part, he attributes that to BMAC’s effort to extend its communications reach beyond Brattleboro. In addition, after fluxes in admission fees necessitated by Covid and some resulting epiphanies, BMAC has stopped charging admission altogether, “and that has definitely made a difference in our attendance,” Lichtenfeld adds.
“Even though it was a small admission, just the notion that it’s free” has generated a draw, he says.
“Let’s say you’re here 15 minutes early to meet somebody at the Co-op. You can just pop across the street and breeze around for a minute. Something else that’s had an impact is that we continue to really lean into collaborating with other organizations and players in the community.”
Find Tape Art Mega Corp. takes place at at 28 Vernon St., Brattleboro (the office building next door to the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center). Drop-ins are welcome anytime from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, March 21, and Sunday, March 29, and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. from Monday, March 22, to Saturday, March 28. Come for an Office Pizza Party from 4 to 6 p.m. on Sunday, March 29, to help tear down the tape. For more information, visit brattleboromuseum.org.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.