About

Tape Art began in Providence, RI in 1989 with a simple concept: tape could turn almost any surface into a drawing, then disappear without leaving a trace. The Tape Artists developed a way of working that was spontaneous, collaborative, and responsive to its surroundings. They drew on schools, museums, hospitals, storefronts, sidewalks, silos, bridges, and tunnels. They invited people to participate and treated the process of making the art as the art itself. Most murals were intentionally removed within 24 hours.

That practice took on a new purpose after the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Three Tape Artists worked for 58 hours straight on a three-story drawing inside the Myriad Convention Center, at the heart of the rescue operation. The mural grew amid the work of firefighters and rescue crews, who stopped to talk, reflect, and rest. The artists also drew with injured children and their families in local hospitals. Those encounters changed their understanding of themselves as public artists. Temporary art could make room for conversation, healing, and collective response.

When the World Trade Center was attacked in September 2001, the Tape Artists felt an overwhelming need to respond. Tape Art had a studio in Jersey City overlooking lower Manhattan at the time and could see the billowing aftermath. The artists had also met members of the New York rescue teams while working in Oklahoma City. Tragically, some of those firefighters were among the 343 killed when the towers fell. Within a week of the attacks, the artists made the decision to draw life-size silhouettes of the firefighters and airline passengers killed at the World Trade Center, using the buildings and public spaces of Manhattan as their canvas.

The scale of the loss was staggering, but it would take years to determine the final death count. In the unsettling period between death and enumeration, the portraits of firefighters and airline passengers became witnesses to an evolving death toll. The drawn tape silhouettes were depicted with raised hands, collectively counting other victims whose deaths had been fully established.

For five years the artists compared government, news, and independent lists, collecting photographs and biographies and revising their records. As victims were identified and the final number emerged over the following years, the tape figures' counting gestures were progressively reduced, transforming the work from an act of counting into a fixed memorial.

A series of four hearts drawn on a map of Manhattan became the path on which all 490 portraits were drawn. The artists doggedly followed those paths, making decisions between drawing on banks or convenience stores, bus shelters or federal buildings, all the while navigating security guards, shopkeepers, and passersby. Where the heart paths intersected Central Park, the lack of walls forced the artists to use natural materials to create portraits at those locations.

The artists finally drew the last figure in the spring of 2005. The larger project continued through September 2006 as the artists and other collaborators turned their ephemeral work into a public record. They ultimately devoted more than 30,000 volunteer hours to it, without grants, outside funding, or institutional backing.

The original website was built so the drawings could remain free and accessible to the public after the tape came down. On it were assembled roughly 15,000 photographs along with maps, written reflections, soundtracks, 360-degree panoramas, photo collages, and a short video podcast for every location. The Tape Artists built distinct digital journeys through each of the four hearts, a searchable index of names, Google Earth placemarks, and 1,500 stripped-down pages that could even load on flip phones.

The website existed in all its glory for only a few years. It was originally published at tapeart.com/hope for the fifth anniversary in 2006, but shifts in internet infrastructure eventually rendered the site’s database and media formats obsolete. Luckily, the artists preserved an archive of the original photographs, films, maps, narratives, and dedications. This rebuild brings this media back together so the work can again be encountered on its own terms. It is a remembrance made by artists moving through a city and leaving no trace.

Gordon Wintrob found the project in 2026 through the documentary Secret Mall Apartment and went looking for the digital tour, only to discover that it was gone. He wrote to Tape Art, offered to rebuild it and keep it online, and they opened their extraordinary archive.