Walker Tufts uses writing, art, and dialogue to explore collaboration, institutional forms, and pedagogy. Walker was a member of international collective spurse from 2004-2007, helped design, build, and run a restaurant and venue from 2007-2009 and graduated from James Madison University with a Masters in Studio Art in 2011. During summers from 2007-2011 he worked at Mildred's Lane. Last year he worked as Communications Curator at Elsewhere and did freelance work at Salt & Cedar. He currently works with Camp Little Hope.
CAMP LITTLE HOPE
Camp Little Hope develops humorous, considered means of imaging deep time and focused research on the power of information design to alter our relationship to the commons. Camp Little Hope imagines new worlds through curatorial interventions, designed artifacts, information design, and catalyzed epiphanies. Our different practices explore these ideas through proprioceptive museum installations, free algorithmic restaurants, sustainable energy initiatives, traveling libraries, alternative institutional forms and robots.
Past Collaborations
Salt & Cedar
Production Assistant
A letterpress studio in historic Eastern Market, Detroit that produces custom design work and printed matter. Within the 3,000- sq. ft. space, farm-to-table food events, a pop-up cinema, exhibitions, dinner theatres, readings, design lectures, live music, and special curricular offerings are slated with a diversity of cultural and creative partners. Megan O'Connell and Leon Johnson direct this complex of events, production, and potentialities
Elsewhere
Communications Curator
Elsewhere is a living museum using the massive collection of its former thrift store to build futures from old things. We generate collaborative creativity in our downtown neighborhood and across the globe.
Mildred's Lane
Research Librarian & Archivist
Mildred's Lane, a rustic, 96-acre site deep in the woods, a home, and an experiment in living, is an ongoing collaboration between J. Morgan Puett, Mark Dion, their son Grey Rabbit Puett, and their friends and colleagues. Mildred’s Lane attempts to coevolve a rigorous pedagogical strategy, where a working-living-researching environment has been developed to foster engagement with every aspect of life.
Spurse
Collaborator
Spurse is a research and design collaborative that catalyzes critical issues into collective action. Through a playful transformation of conceptual and material systems, spurse develops problems worth having and worlds worth making, engaging across scales and complexities of all things human and nonhuman, organic and non- organic. Spurse begin every endeavor by locating ourselves of the world, not merely in the world.
Corwen: Artist in Residence
Camp Little Hope was commissioned by the Corwen Partnership, the Arts Council of Wales, and Addo, to imagine creative uses for a field that separates Corwen’s Town Square from the future platform of the Llangollen Railway. We developed three long term strategies for the field and town: Gardd Ceridwen (a platform for exploring biosecurity), the Toiledau Residency, and the Wayfinding project. We explored specific aspects of each strategy through art interventions.
Bibotorium
The Bibotorium was an educational saloon and public think-tank. Camp Little Hope explored the future of water in Philadelphia through conversations with our visitors: tourists, neighbors, students, amateurs and experts. During the Hidden City Festival we worked on site, designing solutions to various issues affecting Philadelphia’s water and building boats to reference the implications of future water environments. By creating a space that is both social and scientific, we encouraged radical and imaginative conversations to address serious problems.
One Minute Film Festival: 10 Years
The One Minute Film Festival took place annually in a barn outside of a small town in upstate New York, on the first Saturday after the 4th of July, from 2003-2012. Organized and hosted by artists Jason Simon and Moyra Davey, the festival samples a decade through the participation of hundreds of makers: ten years spanning the extremes of George Bush and Barack Obama, of You Tube and the near ubiquity of video within cultural institutions.
Construct Decay
A series of experiments investigating the role of automation and reproduction. Sculptural components were hand-manufactured, made in great enough multiples to pique curiosity as to their purpose. Video was also used to further extend the quantity of the hand-manufactured. Other videos used automation, like Photoshop CS5's content-aware fill, to generate entirely new work through the accretion of minor changes.
Picket Wheel
The Picket Wheel was a conversational catalyst and urban/rural intervention activating dialogues about private property, landscape, the gaze, and the commons. Rolling the Picket Wheel down the street opened conversations with pedestrians, cyclists, and almost as often drivers who would pull over to investigate
Blue Nile
Blue Nile Ethiopian Cuisine occupies two levels of a former hotel in downtown Harrisonburg. An Ethiopian restaurant & bar upstairs with a bar & music venue in the basement. The original Blue Nile brought Ethiopian Cuisine to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Moving to a larger location and opening a music venue the Blue Nile played an important role in Harrisonburg’s downtown revitalization.
The Public Table
The Public Table, with spurse, was a provisional free restaurant traveling from New Haven, CT to Bellows Falls, VT and ending in Cambridge, MA. The materials, both for the installations and meals, were gleaned. The number of dishes, size of the dishes, number of ingredients, type of ingredients and amounts of each were determined by an algorithm driven by a walk taken earlier in the day. The interiors of each restaurant were driven by the available materials in the different location