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Michael Townsend isn’t from Oklahoma City, and he hasn’t spent much time here.
But his life changed here almost 30 years, and that keeps the Rhode Island artist coming back periodically — and always with tape in hand.
“1995 was the beginning of my professional career … and it was the first time we had experienced the idea that art could serve a healing purpose. And under such extreme circumstances, we were very fortunate the processes that we had been working on for so many years were such a good fit,” Townsend told The Oklahoman on Thursday morning at the downtown OKC offices of the deadCenter Film Festival.
In 1995, Townsend and a group of his fellow tape artists embarked on a six-month, 40-city tour that would route them through OKC in April, just in time for an anticipated engagement at the downtown Festival of the Arts.
They were almost to Oklahoma on April 19, 1995, when they got word that a bomb had blown up outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown OKC. The blast left 168 people dead, including 19 children, and injured more than 500 people.
Although the arts festival was canceled, Townsend and his Tape Art team came to Oklahoma City anyway.
“We arrived just as this disaster was unfolding … and Peter Dolese was our point of contact there. He worked for the Arts Council (OKC) and realized that the work that we do, which is designed to respond to the moment … might be a good fit for a hospital. And then after that, we might be a good fit for working with students that have been inevitably affected by this chaos,” Townsend recalled.
“Then, after having done those two things, he said, ‘Let’s put you at the heart of the rescue operation itself.'”
Best remembered in OKC for creating with his fellow artists the three-story tape artwork “The Hope Mural” inside the Myriad Convention Center in the days after the bombing, Townsend is back in the Sooner State for the deadCenter Film Festival, which continues through Sunday and is showing a new documentary called “Secret Mall Apartment” that highlights the biggest projects of his artistic career.
But he and Tape Art teammate Leah Smith also are creating new temporary murals at SSM Health-St. Anthony Hospital, with homeless students at Positive Tomorrows, and at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum.
“Here again, they wanted to do something that was appropriate for the space — and I definitely felt the weight of them creating somewhat of a temporary memorial within the Memorial Museum,” said Stephen Evans, director of education and public programming at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum.
“It’s a reminder that this was not just a local story; this was a national or even worldwide story. And the ripple effects and the amount of people it touched is just massive.”
How does a new tape artwork at the national memorial resemble a massive mural made after the bombing?
On the walls of the classroom inside the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, five life-size figures rendered in bright blue painters tape carry green pails to a spraying fountain in the same verdant hue.
“It was pretty remarkable to watch them in action and think about just what was going on 30 years ago — and what pulls a person to do that sort of work for free,” Evans said. “It wasn’t for the public. It was for the rescue workers, the first responders, and those in support of the rescue. … And I think that’s a beautiful part of that story.”
Titled “To Fill a Fountain,” the new artwork the Tape Art pair created Wednesday inside the National Memorial Museum is much more modest than the vast “Hope Mural,” which is shown on screens throughout the classroom. But the resemblance to their 1995 tape project is undeniable.
Back then, Townsend and his cohorts worked round the clock for 58 hours to complete the angelic artwork inside what was then called the Myriad Convention Center (later the Cox Convention Center and, for now, Prairie Surf Studios), which was the staging area for the rescue workers.
“Our team of three artists were given a wall that was three stories high, and at the one major entrance/exit to the Myriad Convention Center. So, every single rescue operator had to pass by the drawing as we were making it, and it was the first thing they saw when they came back from doing work at the blast site,” Townsend recalled.
“From that point on, we have dedicated our practice to a lot of healing artworks. So, the two of us work regularly in psychiatric facilities; we’re in hospitals all the time. And when there are communities that have experienced deep traumas, there are often windows there where a tape art process is really good, because it can reach a lot of different people where they are emotionally.”
Although she wasn’t with the team when they visited OKC in 1995, Smith said she has heard so much about it.
“It changed our course from just being regular public artists to doing work in spaces where art is serving a purpose,” she said.
It also affirmed for the artists the power of tape as a medium for making large-scale temporary artworks.
“Tape allows you to make spontaneous imagery, without damaging the surfaces that you’re working on. So, you can often get permission for buildings you would literally never (with paint murals). We have taped on museums, historic buildings. We’ve done projects with and without permission in a way that allows you to sort of like speak and have a public voice, but then not leave it behind forever. So, it can really meet a moment,” she said.
“Especially in a memorial context, it can say something important for that time, and then it can be released and let go.”
How did the Tape Art team find their story told in the documentary ‘Secret Mall Apartment?’
During their annual March trek to South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, members of OKC’s deadCenter Film Festival team decided to check out the buzzy world-premiere documentary “Secret Mall Apartment”
“When we saw it at South By Southwest, our senior programmer, Kevin Ely, was like, ‘We have to have this film, because it features Oklahoma,” said deadCenter Film Executive Director Cacky Poarch.
“For Michael, in particular … we (in Oklahoma City) were very pivotal in his journey, and so I’m so excited that they are in town for the deadCenter Film Festival.”
Directed by deadCenter alumni Jeremy Workman and executive produced by Oscar-winning actor Jesse Eisenberg, the documentary follows eight young Rhode Islanders, including Townsend, who in 2003 created a hidden communal living space — complete with furnishings and a locked door — in a 750-square-foot crawl space tucked away inside the Providence Place Mall.
“The reason for building it was rooted in responding to an intense gentrification wave that washed over our neighborhood. Myself, Leah, all of our peers lived in industrial mill buildings … and developers came in and said, ‘Let’s knock these buildings down. Let’s build strip malls. Let’s put it in grocery stores. Let’s erase the history that’s here and reboot,” Townsend said.
“We lost our homes, and then this group of artists, dealing with the emotions of having lost a home … turned their focus to the mall and turned it to the same developers. Much the way that our neighborhood was gentrified, we turned around and gentrified a small, tiny, abandoned space inside the mall.”
Until they were discovered by mall security and banned, the group of eight artists lived and worked out of the “Secret Mall Apartment” for four years, during a time frame that was crucial to Townsend — and stemmed from the Tape Art team’s original OKC work.
“We continued the echo of those processes for decades afterwards. When the World Trade Center fell, we made the decision to go into Manhattan and draw a life-size portraits of every single airline passenger and every single fireman that died at the World Trade Center,” Townsend said, adding that he met some of those fallen firefighters in OKC in 1995.
“Our team of tape artists worked on that project for five years, and, simultaneously, we started working in hospitals on a weekly or biweekly basis, working with cancer patients, doing drawings in their hospital rooms … and then we were in the secret mall apartment during the exact same time.”
Also during that period, Townsend returned to OKC with his fellow artists in 2005 for the 10th anniversary of the bombing and did a weeklong series of volunteer projects.
“In the movie, you get to see little little tiny highlights from our journeys in ’95 and 2005,” Townsend said. “The healing arts are not only for the people we’re working with, but for ourselves.”
What are the Tape Artists doing during this visit to Oklahoma City?
As part of deadCenter, Townsend and Smith will participate in Q&As after both screenings of “Secret Mall Apartment” at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Harkins Bricktown 16, and at 12:30 p.m. Sunday at First Americans Museum. On Friday, they will be creating tape murals at the festival’s new dC Hub at the Fordson Hotel (formerly 21c Museum Hotel).
Also on Friday, the pair will do an artist talk from 11 a.m. to noon at the National Memorial Museum, where the new tape mural will be on view in the classroom through Sunday. It is free to view with paid museum admission during regular hours from 9 a.m to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday.
“This has always been the home base for the big shifts in our career. We have an infinite debt of gratitude that we owe to the city,” said Townsend, adding that the National Memorial’s staff added his oral history of his OKC art experiences to its archives.
“Having traveled to a lot of cities and done a lot of projects with wide-ranging institutions, Oklahoma City does it best. Their ability say yes and find ways to make things happen have always been so, so impressive.”
2024 DEADCENTER FILM FESTIVAL
- When: Through Sunday, June 9.
- Where: Multiple venues in downtown Oklahoma City.
- Schedule: https://dcff.eventive.org/schedule.
- ‘Secret Mall Apartment’ screenings and Q&As: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Harkins Bricktown 16, and 12:30 p.m. June 9, First Americans Museum.
- Tickets and information: https://deadcenterfilm.org.
OKC TAPE MURAL ‘TO FILL A FOUNTAIN’ ON VIEW
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