Artists and spouses, Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto present their experiences to a group of Brown University students last night. Townsend’s actions left him battling trespassing charges, and being banned from Providence Place. The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

PROVIDENCE — Once in a while Michael Townsend misses the Providence Place mall, now that he’s been banned indefinitely.

The 37-year-old artist has mixed feelings about Providence’s capital of commercialism, where he, his wife and six other artists secretly built and furnished a studio apartment in which they stayed on and off for about four years before he was caught by mall security two months ago.

He was hit with a criminal charge of breaking and entering, which was reduced to trespassing in District Court, and he escaped with probation and a legal disposition that does not constitute a criminal conviction. But before he was taken out of the mall in handcuffs, he was forced to sign a paper in which he acknowledged his banishment to mall management.

“Hopefully they’ll lift [the ban] someday,” Townsend said in a presentation at Brown University last night, and then he added, “God forbid I get a gift card” for a mall store.

Townsend and his wife, Adriana Yoto, helped to build the apartment in an unused storeroom. It was accessible by a door in a stairwell as well as an 11-inch-wide aperture in an exterior wall that they called “the squeezehole” — their original entry point.

The couple discussed their mall experience and showed video snippets in a rambling presentation to a crowd of about 80 people at MacMillan Hall, an academic building at Brown.

James Mercer, one of the mall artists, has said that Townsend’s banishment is significant.

“If you consider the mall the main cultural center of Providence, then, in a sense, Mike has been permanently excommunicated, made into an outsider in his own city,” Mercer commented recently.

It was a combination of things that led the group to their cheeky adventure, they have said, including Yoto’s self-described obsession with shopping malls, her research of malls as part of her college education, and what Townsend has called his journey of self-discovery.

“What’s it going to take to get me in a buttoned-down shirt,” said the artist, who is known for wearing rumpled clothing often obtained as handouts.

They also have admitted that it was fun to misbehave.

As Townsend has said, “We were tapping into the collective thrill for everybody” who has not had the opportunity or the courage to flout convention and the law.

When developers tear down historical buildings in Providence, they tell people that they are capitalizing on underutilized spaces and that they create communities where none exist, according to Townsend. By creating a home in an underutilized mall space, the eight participants in effect were doing the same thing, he said.

“We don’t feel it’s wrong to be in those spaces,” he said shortly after his arrest. The group did feel guilty about plugging into the mall’s electricity, and they disclosed last night that they occasionally slipped envelopes containing twenty-dollar bills under the door of the manager’s office to pay for it.

Townsend and Yoto both insisted last night that although the apartment project was documented on Web sites, its existence was meant to be shared only with friends and not to be publicly divulged. While the project has been widely described in international news coverage as performance art, Townsend said that he did not see it as art until it was discovered.

Yoto, 29, a master’s degree candidate in international relations at the New School in New York City, has said that she, her husband and the other participants tirelessly wandered the mall and documented a wide variety of observations — everything from the placement of advertising to the location of surveillance cameras and sewer lines — for personal enlightenment as well as an academic exercise. She posted some of the results on a Web site called Malllife ( www.colincantread.com/Yoto/Malllife.html).

“It was part of our process of exploring and getting to know our neighbor and how its physical presence has altered the spatial relations of our city,” Yoto said recently.

The apartment project was an extension of that preoccupation with the mall and its effect on the cityscape, she explained.

The artists are now grappling with a legal challenge from General Growth Properties, the Chicago company that owns Providence Place as well as 223 other malls and shopping centers.

“We’re about to learn a really, really brutal lesson” about trespassing, Townsend said last night.

General Growth Properties has made a formal written demand for all of the still and video images that the artists made while they were in or near the mall, as well as the maps and drawings that they produced. And the mall company has demanded that the artists sign a confidentiality agreement that, according to Townsend, would prohibit them from talking about their mall experience.

General Growth Properties contends that it has the worldwide intellectual-property rights to the images and that it wants to head off copycats who might try to invade its real estate, among other arguments, according to Townsend.

Townsend said he has offered to give the company all of the photos and videos that he produced but that the company maintains that all of the artists must surrender whatever they have. If its demands are not met, he said, the company has threatened to sue the artists.

For the moment, he added, the issues are being negotiated.

The mall-dwellers are scheduled to give another presentation from 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. today in Galanti Lounge in the main library at the University of Rhode Island’s Kingston campus.

The presentation, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Living in Providence Place Mall: Performance as Art.” Directions and parking information are available at the visitors center.

With a report from Journal staff writer Philip Marcelo.

gsmith@projo.com