Summary
- Michael Townsend, who will deliver a keynote address at the IHI Forum, and Leah Smith share lessons about collaborating on temporary art projects that transform spaces in partnership with patients, families, staff, and communities.
Michael Townsend is most famous for his artwork featured in the award-winning documentary Secret Mall Apartment, produced by Jesse Eisenberg. These works and the process of making them have been seen by millions of viewers and are the lived embodiment of collaboration as a catalyst for action.
Townsend is the first practicing tape artist and the founder of the Tape Art movement. For over 35 years, he has been spearheading collaborative drawings using low-adhesive tapes that can be stuck on facades, sidewalks, walls, and any other surface without permanent repercussions. His uniquely accessible teaching practice has made this participatory work a good fit for hospitals, psychiatric facilities, nursing homes, prisons, and communities struggling to have their voices heard. Beyond Tape Art, Townsend has taught collaborative art-making for decades in both formal and informal settings.
Townsend and his collaborator, Leah Smith, spoke with IHI. Townsend will present a keynote address at the 2026 IHI Forum (December 6–9, 2026 in Phoenix, AZ), and together they will do a live demonstration of Tape Art.
You have spent decades creating temporary murals of Tape Art with kids who are patients at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. How did you get started?
Townsend: We had been doing Tape Art in Providence for almost a decade when we were contacted by the newly opened children’s hospital. We’re not sure how they found us, but we were invited to volunteer as artists at the hospital.
We would draw on the walls of hospital room, hallways, and waiting areas. The content of those drawings came from patients, parents, and staff. These drawings are wonderfully weird. You say, “I need to see a porcupine bursting balloons.” What joy for us to say, “Yes, that idea is amazing,” and then draw it on the wall for you, or with you if you’re able.
We would go a minimum of once a week, sometimes two or three times, whenever we had energy. Often when we arrived on a unit, the child life specialist would say, “I'd love you to visit these five rooms in particular.”
Between 1997 and 2014, we did our first 1,000 drawings. Close to 30 years after we started, we are still at that institution.
You tell all the people you do Tape Art with, “There’s only one rule. No words or letters.” Where does that rule come from?
Smith: A lot of people’s first impulse when they don’t feel confident drawing is to write the thing that they would like to draw. They might write the word “love” for example. The thing that most people are interested in writing is their own name. The boundary “no words or letters” makes people try to communicate through drawing alone. In addition, we found that helps with collaborating. When working with others, it is easier to add to or expand on a drawing, but it's very hard to expand on a written word.
How does temporary art make a difference in the wake of tragedy?
Townsend: Our first experience in the healing arts was in 1995 when we were in Oklahoma City in the aftermath of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing. We did Tape Art in a children's hospital, at local schools, and at the heart of the rescue operation. This medium allowed us to address the people and trauma in real time.
We’re using a toolkit of art making to try to address things that are unsolvable. You can resolve the feelings, even if you can't resolve the situation. And because it is temporary, you can often navigate gatekeepers and permissions quickly to actually do the work in the moment that it is most needed.
Smith: Because tape is temporary, it can be an expression of something that is only for right now. You can make a statement or get out heavy feelings, but those don’t have to represent your community visually going forward.
What impact do you see on people in the hospital?
Townsend: When you’re sick, you can feel like a prisoner in your own body. The spaces that you’re in can be an echo of that feeling because you don't have control over them. Tape Art gives people autonomy and a sense of ownership because it’s their ideas up on the walls. For the patients, we represent one of the few adults that invite them to push us around. As tape artists, we come in and ask, “What do you want? Where do you want it?”
Smith: It's a social valve, for children and parents. In cancer units, kids are getting chemo, and they could be there for five hours. Patients in the ICU can be there for months.
Townsend: We try to be well-versed in every type of chit-chat that exists, from sports to pop culture. We study. I’ve got opinions about Spider-Man.
Smith: In institutional spaces all over the place, whether they be schools, or hospitals, or community centers, the walls stay the same: blank, easy to clean, sterile. We say, you get to decide what is in front of you today.
How do you navigate collaboration within a group?
Smith: When you’re collaborating, you are agreeing upon a starting place, but not an ending place. There has to be an openness along the way. That is something you have to practice. If you are somebody who really needs a clear path, try to find a person to balance you out who can break up your sense of structure, whether they're inside or outside your organization. We need both.
Townsend: Most people are exposed to the arts in models that are not collaborative. Visual art education often focuses on you as an individual. Band or theater is rooted more in a teamwork model with separate parts working to produce a known result. For true collaboration, in and out of the arts, you have to be able to operate in ambiguity. Along the way, you can get better at things like brainstorming, critique and evaluation, and giving and accepting feedback. It's an emotional process.
How do you approach doing Tape Art across different communities and cultures — from the hospital in Providence to working with Afghan mural artists in Vermont?
Smith: We are always interested in how art can serve. In Brattleboro, Vermont, we worked with refugee muralists from Afghanistan to remix 17 of their murals in Kabul onto the walls of their new home city. It was a highly visible way to introduce the existing community to these new artists.
Townsend: When we work with any community or institution, we ask, “What do you need? How can art serve you?” We bring our expertise and best practices, but we approach the practice of Tape Art as a service model.
Your art has overcome logistical, physical, and legal barriers — hauling cinderblocks up ladders and entering spaces without permission. What advice do you have for healthcare professionals looking for renewed energy?
Smith: Whether you’re making art that gets you in trouble, or you’re a healthcare professional going out on a limb to start a program for patients that is outside what has been done before — that is a risk. Setbacks are part of the reality, like getting a yes or finding a budget. If you feel very deeply that the vision is worthy, that will help push you through those setbacks.
Townsend: Every time we leave the hospital, my goodness, we’re tired. And we recognize what incredible energy it must require for people that work in those environments day-in-and-day-out. The most dangerous thing for losing energy is repetition and stagnation. It takes even more effort to create something new, but newness is a generator of its own momentum.
Find a team that is part of your mission. Try not to go alone.
Editor’s note: This interview was edited for length and clarity.
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