Tape artists, from left, Adriana Yoto, Erik Talley, Andrew Oesch, Jay Zehngebot, James Mercer, Michael Townsend, Colin Bliss, and Greta Scheing pose for a group portrait on Syms Avenue.

JOURNAL PHOTO / Gretchen Ertl

TAPEART.COM/HOPE

PROVIDENCE — Last month, millions of Americans took time out to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Some went to church. Others listened to speeches. Others observed a private moment of silence.

Still, it’s safe to say that few people marked the occasion quite like Mike Townsend, a self-described “tape artist” who has spent the last five years creating an elaborate, though so far largely unheralded, memorial to the victims of 9/11.

Titled “The Eleventh of September: an act of remembrance,” the memorial consists of nearly 500 figurative silhouettes that Townsend and a crew of assistants have “drawn” on buildings, shop windows and other public places throughout Manhattan. The silhouettes, which are made using colored painter’s tape, include images of police and firefighters, as well as more anonymous figures, and are meant to represent the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

In the five years that Townsend and his fellow tape artists have worked on the project, many of the figures have been damaged or removed. Yet quite a few remain — a testament both to the resilience of the painter’s tape (Townsend uses a special brand imported from Canada) and the artists’ skill in using it.

At the same time, almost every aspect of the project has been carefully, even obsessively documented. Much of this material, which includes maps and photographs of all 490 silhouettes, as well as background material on hundreds of the 9/11 victims, can be found on Townsend’s Web site, www.tapeart.com/hope.

“Basically, it all started with a simple idea: to pay our respects to the victims of 9/11,” says Townsend, a lanky 34-year-old who began his tape-art career while attending the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1990s.

Back then, Townsend and his friends would stay up all night making tape-art murals on dorms and other campus buildings. One night they created a forest on the walls of the RISD cafeteria. Another night they drew a dizzying geometric pattern on the patio of RISD’s student center.

Perhaps their most elaborate effort was a 50-foot maritime mural, complete with lashing waves, saber-rattling pirates and a life-size sailboat. Fittingly, the mural was installed on the wall behind the “RISD Beach,” a favorite campus meeting place at the corner of Benefit and Waterman streets.

“I actually climbed up the wall to do the mast for the sailboat,” Townsend says proudly.

To create a tape-art mural, Townsend typically makes a rough pencil sketch, then begins “drawing” directly on whatever surface happens to be handy. Because the painter’s tape he uses has a strong adhesive, it sticks to almost anything — glass, wood, metal, masonry. Yet because it’s easy to tear, the tape can be applied in almost any shape, from a straight line to a circle.

“Once you get the hang of it, it’s just like drawing on a sheet of paper,” Townsend explains.

After graduating from the School of Design in 1994, Townsend began looking for ways to expand the tape-art universe. One of his first brainstorms was to contact some of the companies that manufactured painter’s tape and offer them his services. To his surprise, one company invited him to decorate their Cleveland, Ohio, headquarters.

“It was totally out of the blue,” he says.

Later, Townsend began working with hospitals, including Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence. He says children, in particular, loved seeing tape-art jungles, forests and oceans materialize in their rooms.

“Some, I’m sure, were just happy to have us around,” he says. “As a kid, it can be pretty lonely to be stuck in a hospital room all day. But mostly, they enjoyed watching the murals take shape. One day, they’d be staring a blank wall. Then next day, they’d be looking at a jungle filled with wild animals.”

In 1995, Townsend was attending an arts festival in Oklahoma City, Okla., when two antigovernment zealots — Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh — detonated a massive truck-bomb outside a federal office building. The blast killed 168 people and wounded hundreds of others, including dozens of children. The arts festival was canceled, but Townsend and three of his assistants decided to stay on, eventually working for a week at a local pediatric hospital.

“Basically, we said, hey, we’re here, we want to do something, how can we help?”

Six years later, Townsend was living in Jersey City, N.J., directly across from Lower Manhattan, when terrorists attacked the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Again, he felt compelled to do something.

“Every night, I could look out the window and see the lights of the work crews and recovery teams at Ground Zero,” he says. “After a while, I just couldn’t sit still anymore.”

Since then, Townsend and a crew of volunteers have created what might be described as the world’s first stealth-memorial — a series of 490 tape-art silhouettes that suddenly appear (and sometimes just as suddenly disappear) on buildings, shop windows, subways and other public spaces. Not only are the silhouettes based on actual photographs of victims of the World Trade Center collapse, but Townsend and his fellow tape artists have distributed these ghostly figures throughout Manhattan.

When the figures are connected, something Townsend’s Web site allows visitors to do using a version of Google Earth, they form a series of interlocking hearts that stretch from Ground Zero to Harlem.

Asked why he didn’t try to illustrate all 2,749 people who died at Ground Zero, Townsend says the number was simply too large. Instead, he focused on police, fire and other emergency personnel.

“Early on, we realized that we couldn’t do everyone,” he says. “So we decided to focus on the people who died trying to help others.”

Amazingly, despite the time and effort he’s invested in “The Eleventh of September,” Townsend has never received any public or private funding. Instead, he’s paid for the entire five-year effort, including the 490 silhouettes and the tapeart.com/hope Web site with its extensive research and documentation, out of his own pocket.

“Initially, all our energy went into getting the project started,” says Townsend. “Then, once we got going, it was hard to stop and ask for money.”

Now that the fifth anniversary of 9/11 has passed, Townsend says he is actively seeking funding, especially for the tapeart.com/hope Web site. “It’s gotten so big that we really could use some help,” he says.