Drawings from the Beginning
Providence, Rhode Island

The very first consistent collection of Tape Art drawings were made in September of 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island. It was a body of work that started on September 16th, long after the sun had fallen, and the night had collapsed into light chaos. To celebrate an evening gone awry, a life-sized silhouette drawing of a figure holding an over-sized balloon was drawn on the ground, using a simple medium - masking tape.

Predawn, 24 hours later, this drawing was removed and replaced with a representation of a prehistoric time gone horribly wrong - dinosaurs and cave-persons strewn everywhere. A dawn later, this drawing was removed and replaced with an elaborate chariot crash.

All the drawings were made in a collaborative fashion with multiple people working on them at the same time. All the drawings were removed within 24 hours of their completion. All the drawings took full advantage of the temporary nature of our medium to gain control of a public space for a short period of time. All the drawings delighted everyone who saw them.

This period of experimentation marks the birth of Tape Art, but it takes many more years before the medium starts to find its true calling as a tool for empowering others to find a voice through acts of collaborative image making.

This drawing is of note because it marks the end of a three month of daily Tape Art drawings. This drawing was made on a December night that was well below freezing and the tape barely stuck to the walls. It also marks the first subtle variation from a strict silhouette, before the medium was retired for the winter.

Exhaustion had set in at this point after months of pre-dawn drawing raids on all the blank walls we could find. This was a fitting experiment for the final mural of that year.