Q&A with ‘Secret Mall Apartment’ Subject and Artist Michael Townsend

Photograph: courtesy of Michael Townsend/Aiyah Josiah-Faeduwor

Michael Townsend first made headlines in 2007, when he and seven friends were discovered living inside a secret apartment they built inside Providence Place. In 2024, the documentary Secret Mall Apartment chronicled their adventures in said space, which has since become firmly entrenched in Rhode Island lore.

Today Townsend, a working artist based in Providence, teaches groups how to create Tape Art, a practice he pioneered in 1989 using tape to create large-scale temporary murals. Townsend and collaborator Leah Smith chatted with us about the secret apartment, their Tape Art endeavors and how they feel about the mall today.

You have Tape Art murals inside Hasbro Children’s. Have you been approached about your work by patients afterward?

Townsend: That’s a good question. We spent so many years in the Hasbro Children’s hospital, making 1,000 murals in patients’ rooms and hallways between 1997 and 2014. As you can imagine, those murals are seen by a lot of people. Working directly with patients and their families — and because of the movie, especially when we had that thirty-two-week run at the [Providence Place] mall, we ended up running into people we had worked with twenty years ago. So, we got updates on their lives and talked with them for a bit. For parents — who had children that were patients who are now adults — to have had the time to reflect on our brief interactions at the hospital, it’s been really powerful to hear their thoughts on everything after all that time.

Are you recognized now when you go out?

Townsend: I used to only wear glasses in my studio just to look at computers, but now I wear them all the time and that’s enough to throw a lot of people off. They’re like, ‘Surely it’s not that old dork with the glasses; surely that can’t be the cool guy that lived in the mall.’ It’s awesome to be able to carry on these conversations about some of the heavier and lighter things and being able to blend into those conversations without people knowing who I am. The movie lays such great railroad tracks for people to have meaningful conversations about the things they care about in the city.

You turned down many filmmakers who wanted to make a movie out of your story. What made you choose the final crew?

Townsend: The turning down was for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which being that the story as a narrative was doing just fine on its own. It didn’t need a movie or a TV series or a book. It was nice to not have my face attached to it because then I could just drift into the realm of folklore. It’s been wild in the last fifteen to sixteen years to watch this thing continue to evolve online. It would jump to the top of Reddit every five years and people would rediscover the story all over again. I liked that it was being introduced to new audiences without us doing anything.

Jeremy [Workman] is a unicorn director for us because we met him by accident in Athens, Greece, working on a Tape Art project. He was shooting a documentary, so we got to witness him doing his job and see how he works with his subjects. I’d seen some of his movies and really liked them because he makes movies about eccentrics or artists. He’s good at being the bridge between those types of people and people who are curious about those types of people. He got the green light because he understood that to tell the story about the mall, you have to tell the story about everything we’re doing at the same time. All the other artworks simultaneously feed into each other. We’re testing ideas, we’re testing out boundaries and what it means to do work illegally, and we’re willing to accept the consequences if things go south. He was also able to convince the other seven artists to say yes, which was a huge feat.

Were the other artists fearful of being pigeonholed into that becoming their entire identity?

Townsend: Definitely. I don’t know what kind of magic Jeremy worked to get them on the film. Some of these artists, they’re deeper in their art. Once you get labeled as someone who lived in a mall, that’s a hard thing to shake.

Did you ever feel that?

Townsend: No, not necessarily. Partly because it wasn’t public while we were doing it. Obviously, it was international news after we got caught, but to me it always made sense. It was just part of my life.

The documentary is made of clips taken by you and the others with an old camera. What did you originally plan to do with those recordings?

Townsend: Nothing. It’s kind of akin to family movies — it was used to document a memory rather than to share with the masses. We spent two years working on this September 11 project leading up to the first time we started working in the mall. So for two years, that group of artists was constantly documenting themselves and their street crimes. We were in the habit of just documenting our process.

Have your feelings about the mall changed since the film’s release?

Townsend: It’s a tough one. I had a moment with one of the heads of the receivership team and we talked about what the mall could be and talked about learning lessons from Providence’s mistakes in the past. Ironically, it was also the receivership team for Eagle Square, which made me go, ‘Wait … both projects are bankrupt?’ I had some genuine optimism for about five or six months where we were having conversations and meetings, and I thought it was the type of leadership that will save the mall. To save it, you’re going to have to take some genuine risks, like change what the mall actually does for Providence. It’s still, at its heart, always going to be a vessel for commercialism, but it could have theater groups and basketball leagues and health care and educational services. There’s more than enough room under that roof for those things to happen.

Nothing happened. This is what happens with so many institutions: You’re always one person away from it being awesome. The crazy thing about the mall is it’s such a big building. Physically, it’s not going anywhere. Providence represents us and they made the decision for us that this is going to be a part of the heart of our city. If it fails, the city will be in real trouble. The Providence Preservation Society wrote that if you demolish the mall, the amount of energy and resources it took to make it would essentially be wasted. It would essentially be an environmental disaster to take all of the energy and resources and waste it.

When I went into the film, I expected to see a bunch of college-age students goofing off and getting away with something super-cool. But when I saw it I realized the film has deeper messages. What was the message or feeling you wanted people to take away from the film?

Townsend: It’s not my film; I’m just on the other end of the camera being interviewed. That said, what I have come to peace with about this being a product out in the world is that it does a great job extending our art-education mission. You have this movie that presents to the viewer an incredibly wide range of art ideas and any viewer, wherever they are in their art journey or their art thinking, can look at the movie and recognize that it’s art. My favorite part is all those voices at the end talking about the art and putting it out in front of the audience. I think that’s really important for viewers because it helps them feel confidence about art and art thinking.

Smith: The film also introduces Tape Art to millions of people. We’ve been doing Tape Art for a long time and people still have never heard of it. That’s because we’re a small crew. It’s not just that we want to get out there ourselves, it’s more the idea that we want to introduce people to this medium as a medium, specifically for social artwork. To see other people doing Tape Art is everything. We cannot do as much Tape Art as we believe would be good for the world, so inspiring others to do it is the goal. Knowing that other people are getting out there and doing it now was one of the main reasons to do the movie. We wanted to share that art form with the world.

What projects are you excited about right now?

Smith: At the end of the school year, we do a lot of teaching K–12 and into college. Today we’re headed off to work with 130 college students up in Worcester. We just got done with a big mural project at Brown. We’ve been doing some mural projects at Holy Cross. We’ve got a small mural project in Boston coming up. It’s just a lot of community work. April is the perfect time of year to capture people before everyone wants to go to the beach.

Townsend: We’re working at Butler and their facilities for the next month-and-a-half.

What do you do when you go to these schools and locations?

Smith: We give them demos and then on their own walls they’re creating imagery with our assistance, mostly just technical assistance. It’s also nice because we get to see tape used in a multitude of ways. We have a very specific style we keep to when we’re doing our own work, for practical and aesthetic reasons. But when you work with a group of 100 people, there are so many different choices that are being made that are inspiring. We get to see new uses for a medium we really love. It’s always delightful to see people invent the medium for themselves because they’re not weighed down by 1,000 years of painting examples that make them feel like they don’t know how to paint. No one knows what Tape Art should look like, so they’re always reinventing it for us in front of us.

Townsend: They’re just drawing all day with tape. Depending on the volume of students, we can take over entire schools.

What do you think of the Providence arts scene?

Townsend:People look at the movie and are upset they missed that period of time in the late ’90s and early 2000s where there were these large collective live workspaces that were basically creative chaos. I’m fascinated that there are so many of these more tightly grouped organized art spaces. It feels like there are even more venues and offerings for people to make art now than there were in the ’90s. The doors are a little bit more open to a wider range of people. In our own neighborhood, there’s the [Lefty Loosey] Bike Collective and the Steel Yard and the LitArts people and that’s all in one neighborhood. Those are spaces anyone can visit. They’re all one step away from being nonprofits if they aren’t already.

Smith: I consider us a pretty artsy city. A lot of the art has become institutionalized in a good way. There are nonprofits out there, there’s Steel Yard and AS220 and they’re providing art to the city, which is amazing. It just doesn’t have the same feel of wild chaos that it did in the ’90s. I think part of that is not just the city, but as a culture we surveil ourselves through social media and through cameras and that type of sharing so it’s a little harder to have those underground spaces without alerting authorities. We have a friend who puts on cool events and he asked if we had any ideas and we were thinking about mini golf in the river. He said we can’t have drunk people in the river, which makes sense, but that just shows the difference in now versus then. As things get more established and they get funding from official sources, there’s more liability. So it’s great that we have these art spaces but it’s a little more guardrailed for us artists who like to do more dangerous pieces.

I read that there may be a full-length feature film being made from the documentary. Is this news to you?

Smith: We’ve heard those rumors and we’ve talked to people who are interested. It’s hard to tell what level of interest that is and if they’re going to be able to scrape together the funding and the writer. Until there’s a script we’re not going to get excited.

What is your dream Tape Art project?

Smith: The biggest one that can’t happen is the Hoover Dam. You could draw the biggest thing, and it would still look tiny on that massive wall. There’s also the Walmart tour, which is a crazy idea where we would literally drive cross-country for one year and go from one Walmart to the next creating Tape Art. They have huge walls, and in the rural communities that’s it for big buildings, so we could cover local folklore on these commercial walls that all look the same. It’s us trying to reflect the local back up onto corporate.

Townsend: The Hoover Dam is the fantasy of fantasies. It’s a tough one because the mission of Tape Art is so oriented toward getting the widest range. We just did a project in Brattleboro, Vermont, that scratched a dream Tape Art itch. It was so good visually and socially because we worked with 1,500 people in nine days. tapeart.com

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.