Here are SOME of our favorite projects and murals from the last 30+ years.
No Stone (2023)
Brattleboro Art Museum, Brattleboro, Vermont
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Leah Smith, Michael Townsend
Part mural, part performance piece, we spent four days faithfully tracing every stone on the front facade of the Brattleboro Art Museum. Thousands of stones later we ended up with a surprising and delightful transformation.
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No stone left un-turned blue.
We Did This Ourselves (2022)
Mobile, Alabama
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Leah Smith, Michael Townsend
We first saw the majestic walls of the old masonic temple in downtown Mobile while on a national mural tour in the spring of 1995. We knew one day we would return. Fast forward 27 years and here we are.
We drew reflections of the emotional landscape of our lives in 1995 versus 2022. On the right are two five-story tall figures who despite deep love are represented here as cosmically incompatible. The tiger pattern on the woman's dress comes to life to shred the man's pants, and open bird cages on his shirt let loose eagles into her hair. On the left, a figure has chainsawed down an old growth tree, but is holding a sapling in her hand. She is growing in a new direction, but the rings inside the trunk remind her of where she has been.
Supposed To Be Sad (2022)
Berlin, Germany
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Leah Smith, Michael Townsend
With the growing prevalence of cell phone footage, security cam footage, doorbell cam footage, and police body cam footage, we bare more direct witness to violence than ever before. Even casual news consumption exposes us to a consistent stream of videos and images of excessive acts of violence.
This mural features an elephant pierced by hundreds of arrows, fallen below the watchful eye of security cameras mounted in a tree. Below the elephant runs an underground tunnel filled with flowers and traversed by children, one of whom pops through a manhole to the surface to discover the aftermath of this violent act. The children do not have a solution for this tragedy, but serve as a hint of optimism, even if that optimism is not apparent in the face of such suffering.
Portrait Place (2021)
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
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Leah Smith, Michael Townsend, Art Allstate
Each figure in this piece was created by a participant of Art All-State, a competitive program for high school art students from across the state of Massachusetts. Each of the 58 student artists reflected on their own personal vulnerabilities and resiliencies to craft a self-portrait that visualizes the way these two forces struggle for balance within themselves.
We completed the final installation, composing the figures together in a peaceful graveyard scene to evoke memorial and reflection.
Atari Safari (2020)
Boston, Massachusetts
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Leah Smith, Michael Townsend
Explorers make their way past larger-than-life Atari 2600 motherboards. Colorful neon tape creates pools of light around the explorers' torches, illuminating the electrical components which become futuristic hieroglyphics on the wall.
Katja (2019)
Teufelsberg, Berlin, Germany
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Katja Meyer, Leah Smith, Michael Townsend
​Katja is a portrait of a friend of ours living in Berlin. At the time of this mural, Katja was pregnant with her first child and described to us the emotions she felt connected to her transition into a new family. The dress, which took 7 hours to make, is covered in the symbol of the all-seeing-eye as a visualization of her unease with the sudden shift from being viewed as a smart, capable, and complete human being to being viewed solely as a woman carrying a child.
Moonwalker (2019)
JFK Presidential Library, Boston, Massachusetts
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Leah Smith, Michael Townsend, Paul Brasio, Polina Volfovich
For the 50th anniversary of the July 16, 1969 lunar landing, we created a life-sized version of the lander module on the walls of the JFK Library. Around the courtyard, vistors to the library could find accurate versions of the objects and scientific equipment left behind on the moon and follow footprints that led them along the path of Neil Armstrong's famous space walk.
Bonfire Stories (2019)
Amarillo, Texas
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Ruby Monegro, Leah Smith, Michael Townsend
This 360-degree installation invited viewers to reflect on the importance of storytelling as a record of people and place. On the walls of this atrium a campfire story about a buffalo casts a larger-than-life shadow onto the trees of a forest at night, the storytellers of the Panhandle’s past and present drift down a stream under a waterfall, and a massive bonfire is being built, just waiting to be lit to tell the greatest story of them all.
It took over 400 hours to create the bark and leaf patterns alone.
The Plants Are Present (2019)
Citadelle Art Museum, Canadian, Texas
Leah Smith, Michael Townsend, Colin Bliss, Pamela Baron
This installation explores our screen usage. Office workers freeze looking at their phones as office plants slowly consume them, much like nature would slowly reclaim an abandoned city. Even the woman paused mid-copy at a Xerox machine is tangled in vines creeping out from the break room.
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Only those protecting the office data servers are still active in this world of spreading green.
Blue Rocks (2018)
Amarilla, Texas
Michael Townsend, Jon Revett, WTAMU Students
An homage to an unfinished original work of land art that included large desert stones painted a light blue. We made a temporary recreation of the blue rocks piece by covering stones in and around the original artwork with rich blue tape. Simple but gorgeous.
Pit-Fowls (2018)
Dartmouth, Massachusetts
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Leah Smith, Michael Townsend, Leah Berbine
Pit-Fowls is a play with patterns: skeleton patters, fire patterns, root patterns, leaf patterns. The transparancy of the window allows for the telling of a story in two parts. From the outside, the veiwer sees only a mysterious, flaming pit. It is only upon entering the building to veiw the mural from the inside that what is burning is revealed.
The many birds encircling the pit are inspired by the reading of two contemporary articles, one detailing the relative biomass of domesticated versus wild birds (70/30), and the other reminding us that birds, like the Blue Heron, are the closest living relatives to the dinosaurs. Their ominous presence in this mural reflects the tension between those two conditions.
Woman Tree (2017)
Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee
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Leah Smith, Michael Townsend
Inspired by the obssessive nature patterns and folkloric storytelling of the southern painter Carroll Cloar we drew a tree filled only with women with the longest hair trailing all the way to the ground.
The ladies lounge with cell phones in hand, each of which are connected to real Instagram accounts bringing the digital conversations of these characters to life for viewers in real time as the drawing unfolds. The young girls on the ground traverse a thick grove to bring chargers to their older counterparts.
Prowling at the base of the Woman Tree is a cock-eyed panther released from Carroll Cloar's painting Story Told By My Mother.
Priber (2016)
AAA Gallery, Weimer, Germany
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Emily Bryant, Michael Townsend
One of a series of installations featuring the German utopic thinker, Christian Gottlieb Priber. In 1735 Priber left Germany to travel to the New World to start utopia. In the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee he found the Cherokee. Living with the Cherokee he saw the foundations for the utopic society he wished to create: free love, equality of genders, shared communal land. He was later captured by the British for assisting the Cherokee resistance and died in prison.
We transformed this gallery into a section of the Unicoi Trail in Tennessee. Over a ton of soil covers the floor. A plaster cast of Priber stands amidst deer carcasses filled with dead leaves, representing the deer skin trade that drove the Cherokee to hunt deer to almost extinction. He holds a glowing fawn because despite watching the decimation of the Cherokee by smallpox and British economic oppression, he retained his utopic optimism.
Grand Rapid Tape Drawing (2015)
Art Prize 7, Grand Rapids, Michigan
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Leah Smith, Charlotte Witte, Tobias Schillnger, Michael Townsend, Joan Townsend
It took no time standing in this parking lot to notice the city's constant parade of bicycles, tall bikes, tandem bikes, roller blades, scooters, long boards, etc.
This mural is a one-to-one reflection of the sidewalk that runs alongside this parking lot and the characters in the mural are portraits of the people that rolled by us on that street. But the city's wheels are being stolen right out from under them as a swarm of mythical catfish grab ahold of anything round. The tape fish were backed with plastic so that bodies rippled in the wind as if they were swimming.
The people of Grand Rapids loved the nod to their culture on the go, and so we decided to "save" them from the catfish scourge by drawing cats parachuting in for the meal of their lives.
Terrorducken (2015)
Dartmouth, Massachusetts
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Colin Bliss, Sam White, Talia Levitt, Leah Smith, Michael Townsend
We did a dinosaur spin on the classic turducken (the cooking of a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey). This four-story atrium became an archeological dig site, with spelunkers uncovering the skeletons of giant dinosaurs, only to realize with horror that inside those skeletons are more skeletons. And inside those skeletons are even more skeletons.
Submerging (2014)
Ishinomaki, Fukishima, Japan
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Leah Smith, Michael Townsend
In 2011 the Fukushima region of Japan was devastated by an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown. Over 350,000 people were evacuated to temporary housing and as of 2014, over 90,000 had yet to find permanent homes.
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In November 2014 we finally got to work with this population in a community located in the city of Ishinomaki, where we created a mural on the side of the community’s meeting building. They requested a mural that reflected the central role fish and fishing play in northern Japan.
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The mural portrays a family from that community. The three figures walk peacefully through a submerged forest surrounded by fish that float between the trees. The young girl turns and touches one of the fish, seeing through it to its ominous skeletal interior.
Buffalo Caverns (2014)
Buffalo, New York
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Leah Smith, Michael Townsend, Kristen Carbone
The first commissioned piece of the Albright-Knox Contemporary Art Gallery's new public art initiative. On the side of the Buffalo Public Library, this mural follows adventurers as they brave the strange dark places of a cavern system. Revealed in the pools of light from their flashlights are various subterranean spaces leading down one by one until a rope ladder leads them up through a huge cavern (rose window) and out into the open air.
The Bathysphere (2014)
Coney Island, New York
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Colin Bliss, Leah Smith, Michael Townsend, Miles LaCouture
Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first 1/2-mile deep ocean dive made by Otis Barton and William Beebe. They used a round submersible called the bathysphere to observe deep-sea animals. There were no cameras on the vessel, so verbal descriptions of the creatures they saw were relayed via telephone to an artist on a ship above to be turned into illustrations.
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Here, we drew the bathysphere life-sized surrounded by two creatures that Barton and Beebe described but have yet to be observed again drawn at monster scale. This mural was accompanied by a partner mural on the Coney Island boardwalk showing the deck of the ship where descriptions of sea life were being recorded.
History Will Save Itself (2013)
Hong Kong, China
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Leah Smith, Michael Townsend
The outer wall of this historic cattle depot turned artist village in an older neighborhood of Hong Kong is located in a neighborhood of shorter buildings from the 1940s filled with elderly residents whose homes are under continuous threat of removal for replacement by the ever-taller high rises that are everywhere in the city. This mural acknowledges the historic usage of this site while presenting an argument for optimism about the future of the neighborhood.
A line of cows (filled in with newspapers and dry-cleaning slips found on the street) are being driven towards the doors of the cattle depot to be slaughtered. At the end of the line a fallen cow splits open to release a flock of birds that fly to the front of the line and lift the cows into the air to freedom. The cattle depot's reinvention as an artists village has saved it from becoming another victim of high-rises.
Crane Vs Crane Vs Shark (2012)
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
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Colin Bliss, Michael Townsend, Emily Bryant
One of our annual murals at the Worcester Art Museum, this mural takes a technique we saw developed in one of our teaching workshops - the creation of 3D netting - and employs it for the fun of a narrative about a crane saving another crane from a body of water filled with sharks.
Unfortunately the rescue does not take place in time to save the original operator.
Roger Williams (2011)
Providence, Rhode Island
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Emily Bryant, Colin Bliss, Michael Townsend, Pamela Baron, Barbara Byers
We worked with the city of Providence to celebrate the 375th anniversary of the city's founder Rodger Williams. We got permission to take over the downtown skating rink.
The central image of the giant tree is the tree under which Roger Williams' body is buried. Below the rink Roger's skeleton is being consumed by tree roots. Around the sides of the rink are the story of the settlers' arrival in Rhode Island drawn in miniature.
At the end of the three week installation, the city was invited to join us for historical reenactments by a Roger Williams impersonator, public lectures, and of course the removal of the mural itself.
Zombie Proof (2011)
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
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Colin Bliss, Michael Townsend, Leah Smith, Barbara Byers
A household goes about its daily life after the zombie apocolypse. On the first floor a quiet family dinner is in progress, on the second floor is a weapons factory and stockpile, and on the third floor is an attic filled with kittens (to distract anyone alarmed by all the weapons).
Outside on the ground are the shadows of the zombies as they would be cast by the light flooding out from the windows of the house.
Let's Draw Together (2010)
Children's Art Museum, New York, New York
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Carly McEnery, Colin Bliss, Michael Townsend
In partnership with the Children's Museum of the Arts we tested a new concept for a mural. It has always been part of our practice to incorporate the ideas of the public that talk to us into our murals. This mural took those interactions a step further by setting up a mural completely by request.
We set up a box in the museum to collect the requests of visitors on slips of paper and then simply drew exactly what we found inside. It made for an interesting exercise in incorporating ideas and some pretty sweet drawings.
Take The Money And Run (2009)
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
Michael Townsend, Amanda Hill
A riff on the classic Adam and Eve story. We emptied our bank account at the time to create this money tree with foliage made out of dollar bills. The tempter snake offers Eve a dollar from the tree as Adam collects coins from the ground into a briefcase.
Rash Of Robberies (2008)
Sherborn, Massachusetts
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Sam White, James Mercer, Michael Townsend, Jay Zehngebot
This stop animation was commissioned by State Radio as their first music video. Their song Rash of Robberies is about the lead singer's grandfather, who slowly loses his memory to dementia. The locations in the video are all places that his grandfather spent time and the large black dog running through the entire peice represents the dementia that begins to destroy his memories, burning everything in its path.
Hong Kong Blossoms (2008)
Hong Kong, China
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Michael Townsend, Debbie Abramson
This project was a peaceful protest in Hong Kong against the eviction and relocation of people living in older neighborhoods in Hong Kong. The 1940s and 50s era buildings were being demolished to make way for skyscrapers. Shop owners holding out against government seizure and local activists came together to increase awareness of the situation and their proposal to save even just one building as a living history museum.
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The protest covered the proposed museum building in tape flowers and drawings and was successful in garnering press. However, when we returned to Hong Kong in 2013 we found that ultimately the buildings did not escape leveling. While skyscrapers may have been inevitable, at least that community did not disappear without being heard. The Hong Kong Blossoms project reminded the rest of the city that they were still there.
Week Of Hope (2005)
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
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James Mercer, Michael Townsend, Adriana Young, Colin Bliss, Greta Scheing, Andrew Osech, Jay Zehngebot, Emily Ustach
For the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing and the Hope Mural we returned to OKC with a crew of Tape Artists for an ambitious week-long residency that included arts festival programing, school workshops, hospital drawings, senior center drawings, and community center drawings, all on top of a huge public art piece.
Everything Must Go (2004)
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
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Adriana Young, Michael Townsend, Andrew Oesch
Everything Must Go is our first foray into large areas of filled in color/texture. The veiwer is still grounded in the drawing by one life-sized human figure.
The contors of this cave follow a line of moisture from rain the day before that retreated up the wall as we worked. Being unable to tape of the wet surface we took the cue for this mural from the natural limitations of the wall.
Return To Eden (2003)
The Revolving Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts
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Michael Townsend, James Mercer, Andrew Oesch, Greta Scheing, Shizuka Ono, Pamela Barron, Jay Zehngebot, Liana, Gabby
Here Adam and Eve return to the Garden of Eden only to find it littered with trash and junk food that the animals are consuming. Even hands the Biblical snake a Fig Newton in lieu of the traditional apple.
This installation incorporates plaster cast sculptures and three-dimmensional tape techniques including tape over wire outline for the animal figures.
Opera (Spring & Fall) (2003)
RISD, Providence, Rhode Island
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Michael Townsend
Opera Fall (2002) and Opera Spring (2003) were experiments in long-term storytelling in tape. For weeks on end we returned daily to the same wall to create successive panels of a long and strange narrative.
Opera Fall included 45 drawings and Opera Spring included 63. Here are a few frames to illustrate the rhythm of how these narratives progressed.
1700 Squirrels (2002)
RISD, Providence, Rhode Island
Michael Townsend
An act of meditation with the goal of making this square a specific shade of green. 1700 squirrels were the perfect pattern to make that shade happen.
This is actually the second attempt at finishing this mural. The first (made a year prior) was destroyed by the combination of rain storm and foot traffic.
Two weeks to make, up for five minutes, and disappeared (see video of removal below).
The New York City Project (2001)
New York, New York
Erik Talley, James Mercer, Jay Zehngebot, Michael Townsend Andrew Osech, Adriana Young, Colin Bliss, Greg Fong, Sam Sharpe, Greta Scheing
When the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001 our first instinct was to measure the loss literally, as a way to understand the tragedy. Starting a week after the attacks we began drawing portraits on the walls of NYC of every fireman and every airline passenger who passed away (it took years to figure out the total casualties, so we focused on the two known groups). Each of the 343 firefighters and 246 airplane passengers holds up fingers that represent the victims of the attacks that we were not able to draw.
This project consumed 5 years. It was done as a rogue memorial without permission. We left it up to each neighborhood to decide what happened to the portraits. Some neighborhoods tore them down immediately while others left them up for years. These portraits and the website/documentation that accompanied them is our most extensive Tape Art project to date.
Hasbro Children's Hospital (1000 Drawings) (2000)
Hasbro Children's Hospital, Providence, Rhode Island
Revolving crew between 1998 and 2015
For seventeen years in a row we did a series of weekly drawings in the Hasbro Children's Hospital in hallways, waiting rooms, and patient rooms. These drawings were often made by request with ideas coming from patients, parents, doctors, nurses, and staff. You can see our own work merged with the handiwork of people of all ages.
Bonfire (1998)
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
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Erica Duthie, Struan Ashby, Michael Townsend
Here a group of people are cleansing themselves of earthly possesions in a joyful bonfire. We are experimenting with drawing large distorted shadows on the ground to give the scene a greater sense of depth.
Hygia (1998)
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
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Erica Duthie, Struan Ashby, Michael Townsend
At 52,000 sqare feet (a city block), this is the largest single Tape Art mural we have ever made. We wrapped the entire Worcester Art Museum in a narrative that told an imagined origin story of one of the museum's statues. As viewers followed the mural around the museum they followed the Hygia statue from its creation through 2,000 years worth of made-up history (including it being sold, stolen, broken, and taken as war booty) and finally to its resting place within the museum itself.
The project took five weeks and was up for five minutes in its completed state before being removed.
Glenn (1996)
Hickory, North Carolina
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Laurel Craft, Erica Duthie, Michael Townsend
Memorial piece for our friend and CEO of the tape company who made our tape from 1992-1999, Glenn Hilton. When we heard of his passing we drove to the tape factory in North Carolina and drew Glenn leaving his office for the very last time. Everything in the mural was based on the memories of his employees.
The figure of Glenn himself took seven hours of continuous adjustment at the prompting of all who passed the mural until everyone agreed that the likeness was a good one.
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We left this mural up for the factory community to remove, which they did one week later.
Innovation (1996)
Scottsdale, Arizona
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Laurel Craft, Michael Townsend
A fanciful version of the evolution of flight, from the absurdity of sling-shotting humens into the air, to lifting small animials using balloons, to paper airplanes, to the crazy propellored machines that have capture our imaginations.
Hope (1995)
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
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Erica Duthie, Struan Ashby, Michael Townsend
In the spring of 1995 we were at an arts festival in OKC when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed. The arts festival was cancelled, but we remained in the city.
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We were invited into the hub of the rescue efforts - the Myriad Convention Center - where we created a mural on a wall adjacent to where rescue crews were entering and exiting the space to the blast site. We drew for the next 58 hours straight as rescue crews cycled through on 12-hour shifts.
The mural depicts people tying feathers onto frames to create wings they lash onto people's backs before lifting them into the air.
Tape Art National Tour (1995)
USA
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Dave Hartley, Rob Coggshell, Erica Duthie, Michael Townsend, Struan Ashby
In 1995 Manco Tape sponsored a nation-wide Tape Art public art tour. In the period of six months we covered 29,000 miles, and did Tape Art projects in 40 states. When we arrived at each mural location we would draw for 24-hours straight, rest for 24-hours, remove the mural, and then get back in the car to head to the next location. Along the way we were also testing the potential for Tape Art as a social and educational medium. We worked with almost every population who could hold a roll of tape.
Static (1994)
Cleveland, Ohio
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Michael Townsend, Erica Duthie, Rob Coggshell, Melissa Brown, Dave Hartley, Jessica Alcorn
Here a celestial television is surrounded by an array of angels at the center of the universe.
The is the second of two murals made back-to-back for a two-day arts festival. It was made out of duct tape so that cars could drive over it.
Student Workshops (1993)
Cleveland, Ohio
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Michael Townsend, Erica Duthie
With a new blue, low-adhesive tape, we could finally begin teaching Tape Art in community centers and schools, like this middle school in Cleveland, Ohio.
Our teaching practice began when we received our first cultural grant to create public murals in Boynton Beach and work in a community center that was the home of two conflicting gangs.
After six weeks of Tape Art workshops we saw members of these rival gangs drawing side by side. The people who ran the community center revealed to us that they had never seen these two groups collaborate on anything together. It put into perspective for us how powerful Tape Art could be as a medium for social interaction.
Egypt (1992)
Cleveland, Ohio
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Laurel Craft, Charles Bandes, Erica Duthie, Michael Townsend
This double-mural marathon resulted in two murals made on the same wall in a single weekend. We drew a circus themed mural over night on Friday. On Saturday night we removed Circus and drew Egypt, which we left up until Sunday night. By Monday the wall was back to normal and there was no sign that anything had ever happened.
This is the first time we drew using a blue painter's tape (CP-26 to be exact). We instantly fell in love. The low-adhesive nature of this new tape meant that we could literally draw on any surface without damaging it. The world became our canvas.
Nude Descending Staircase (1991)
Providence, Rhode Island
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Michael Townsend
Part of a small series of drawings exploring the use of tape to recreate famous paintings. Other drawings in the series included renditions of: Van Gogh's Starry Night, Edward Hopper's Nighthawk, a Jackson Pollock drip and splash painting, and Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
While an interesting theoretical exercize, these drawings clarified for us that the joy of Tape Art is in the spontaneity of original storytelling on a large scale.
Roller Coaster Crash (1989)
Providence, Rhode Island
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Michael Townsend, Original Tape Art Crew
Tape Art originated as a mode of story-telling based on the aesthetic of police chalk outlines. These first narratives were drawn and removed on a nightly basis so that every morning the people of Providence would wake up to find the silhouetted evidence of things that happened while they were sleeping.
Working with the police outline mentality, many of the murals were crash scenes, like this humorous roller coaster crash. Other crashes included chariots, boats and Noah's Ark.