The 401 Q & A
BY TESS LYONS
PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF MICHAEL TOWNSEND / AIYAH JOSIAH-FAEDUWOR.
Michael Townsend
The artist behind Secret Mall Apartment chats about Providence Place, the city’ s cultural scene and his current project, Tape Art.
M
ICHAEL 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 largescale 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.
RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY I JULY 2026 47