One of the small saving graces of working in a faceless corporate cubicle-scape is daydreaming about what you could do with mountains of free office supplies. Those visions become reality from March 21 to 29, when Tape Art Mega Corp sets up shop in an office building next to the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center.
Artists Leah Smith and Michael Townsend, the team behind Tape Art, have created murals the world over using blue and green painter’s tape. In 2022, the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center invited them to work with the ArtLords, a group of Afghan muralists, on the project “Honoring Honar,” a series of tape-art murals around Brattleboro that re-created ones in Afghanistan that were destroyed by the Taliban. Tape Art came back to town in 2023, this time installing “Stone Dreams,” hundreds of blue-and-green landscapes, each temporarily transforming one stone in the museum’s historic façade.
Viewers may also have seen Townsend in the 2024 documentary film Secret Mall Apartment, which tells how, in the early 2000s, he and his friends created an apartment in an empty utility space in the Providence Place shopping mall. That’s where many of Tape Art’s early projects were planned, including a series of memorials to those killed in 9/11 and a yearslong residency at Hasbro Children’s hospital in Providence, R.I.
Tape Art Mega Corp encourages a lighter, participatory take on the art form. The artists invite anyone who wants to stop by, both during the week and at a closing “office party” on Sunday, March 29. Folks should bring their “stick-to-itiveness,” the artists say in a promotional video, to make playful projects in the space — a blank-canvas office that the museum hopes to use for future expansion. Smith spoke with Seven Days by phone about what aspiring “employees” can expect.
What is Tape Art Mega Corp?
Once people come into this exhibit, they are basically hired on the spot. They’ll be making tape-art neckties. Once you have your tie, there are going to be orders to fulfill, tasks to do. There’s going to be a lot of corporate humor.
When you step inside this surreal tape office space, you might get a call that we need 10 raccoons drawn, immediately! As fast as possible! Perhaps, to make sure that we’re in line with our offices over in Tokyo, we need you to change the tape clock hands every 10 minutes for the next hour. We might have some sculptural projects, like creating custom tape coffee mugs for everyone in the office, but we need you to make the designs on them and also build them.
It will be a very fun space where, if you come in more than once, every time you come in there’ll be opportunities to make new sorts of corporate-themed art out of tape.
Does Tape Art Mega Corp employ child labor?
You know, it does! We have found that sometimes children are the best workers. Anyone is welcome. If you’re an adult, definitely come down. If you are a kid, make your parents come down.
You don’t need any tape or art experience; there’ll be training on the spot. And tape is a very accessible medium. If you’re not a person who draws — or maybe you gave up on art a long time ago — if you haven’t tried tape art, it’s definitely worth coming down. It’s sort of a mix of collage and sculpture and drawing, and it can really reach people who maybe don’t consider themselves particularly artistic or makerly. We can use all hands on deck.
What’s the process like? Do people draw in advance or just go straight to tape on the wall?
If somebody truly, truly wants to sketch first, I’m not here to stop them. But how we do it, even in our own art practice, is just drawing directly on the wall with tape.
Tape is a great medium because it allows you to make changes in real time. You can put a line down, decide it’s not quite in the right space, and you can literally pick it up and move it and edit as you go. There’s no erasing necessary. You don’t have to let paint dry and repaint over it. It allows you to draw recklessly without having to worry about that being the final product.
Me and Michael, when we do large murals, sometimes we’ll draw something even as big as a T. rex. For example: Mike will draw a first draft, and we’ll be like, “That’s not quite right,” and sometimes I draw another draft right on top of it. We can pick which pieces we like from both drafts and meld them together.
Is there a mural you can think of that was really surprising for people who were involved in making it?
The surprise is always the rip-down. All of our murals are incredibly temporary. We did a project on the outside of the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center a couple years ago. From afar, the tape does have the appearance of paint. With a lot of our murals and projects, there is that sort of initial reaction of, Oh, my goodness! You’ve painted the outside of this stone building! How could you? And then, when it disappears, there’s also that, Oh, I really miss this piece of artwork.
Just the fact that it shows up and then disappears is truly the most surprising thing. We hope that reminds people that the walls around them are changeable, even if just for a little while, that the structures that we live amongst don’t have to remain stagnant.
And then at the end of the week, what happens?
At the end of the week there will be a corporate pizza party, which everyone is invited to — pizza and fun and looking at what everyone has made over the course of the nine days. It’ll be a celebration. We hope everyone will return if they made something. And people who didn’t can still come and see what got made.
That party is going to end with a rip-down: Everyone will be invited to remove the work from the walls. Ripping tape down is so fun. I’ve ripped down dozens and dozens and dozens of murals at this point. There is just something super cathartic about it.
At first, you’ll be like, Oh, I could never! But then the second the first piece of tape comes off, it is just sharks in the water. It will end up being one big ball of tape. Mega Corp will have to move its headquarters somewhere else.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Sticky Business | Tape Art Mega Corp brings interactive office art”
This article appears in The Food Issue • 2026.
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