Collaboration

Walker Thisted Collaboration

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FGP Atelier

Walker is also the Director of External and Public Affairs as well as Business Development for FGP Atelier - an architecture firm founded by Francisco Gonzalez Pulido in the Fall of 2017. In addition to pursuing new business, Walker directs the creation of new proposals and contracts, competitions, marketing, PR, exhibitions, publications, lectures, and educational efforts. The Atelier recently completed a 20,000 seat baseball stadium in Mexico City and the Land Rover Regional Offices Shanghai (85,000 M2 office and retail complex). We are currently working on a 320 M Tall tower under construction in Guangzhou, a 5,000,000 M SQFT financial center under construction in Shanghai, a 240,000 M2 mixed used development under construction in Shenzhen, the Felipe Angeles Airport at Santa Lucia that will serve Mexico City and 24 million passengers in the first phase and 85 million in the ultimate phase, a 400 M Tower in Nanjing, and a mixed used development in Shanghai among other projects.

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Walker Thisted Collaboration

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BuiltWorlds

As the lead producer of all of video, event, and written content, my role involved collaborating with a broad team to help current and future clients utilize media to infuse their organization with new ideas and spread the message of how they can uniquely serve clients to a wide audience of over 80K individuals in order to support organizational growth and prosperity as well as broader efficiency and sustainability of the built environment. This involved scripting and scheduling the videos and events in order to offer a cohesive narrative of innovation in the built environment. The events included 7 recurring daylong conferences as well as an annual CEO Summit. I worked in close coordination with our Director of Video Production, our Project and Account Managers, our written content team, and our sales / partnership team. My aim was to understand our clients’ history and current efforts to drive innovation, help them develop internal and external messaging via compelling storytelling, and connect their work with other endeavors taking place within the BuiltWorlds ecosystem and beyond.

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Walker Thisted Collaboration

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Sense Culture

After Nikolas Lund and I spent a few years attempting to raise capital for a physical art and social club known as The House, we shifted our focus to creating a virtual platform that supported the production and consumption of art. This collaboration came to be known as Sense Culture. Our goal was to create a platform that would offer guests a curated experience of an environment that would connect a number of different cultural elements, provide context for those elements, and create a platform through which they could record and share these experience. As we developed this concept, we partnered with Lucy Slivinski and Kahil El’Zabar – a noted sculptor and internationally acclaimed painter and musician respectively. They helped us to build the cultural network that would drive the allure of the platform. Ultimately, after spending several years raising venture capital and developing a prototype, Lund and I stepped away from the project as El’Zabar continued developing the platform. We ultimately found that the entrenched ways of consuming culture remained too engrained and that, generally speaking, people would prefer to engage their urban environment without such overt mediation.

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Walker Thisted Collaboration

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Naught and Zygman Voss Galleries

Between 2007 and 2015, I was involved in various capacities curating and managing commercial and experimental art galleries. After moving to Manhattan in the Spring of 2007, I began presenting my own artwork, as well as that of friends, in the living room of my apartment in the Financial District. This practice continued when I relocated 2.5 years later to Chicago in 2009 to pursue an MFA at the School of the Art Institute. I presented work ranging from performance, theater, poetry readings, pop-dinners, sculpture, photography, and painting. This ultimately led me to manage Zygman Voss Gallery – a commercial art gallery specializing in late 19th and early 20th Century prints by Picasso, Miro, and Dali among other. We also represented a few contemporary artists. While at the gallery, I expanded the contemporary program and curated a few shows.

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Walker Thisted Collaboration

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The House at 955 W. Grand Ave., Chicago, IL

Nikolas Lund and I worked with members of the Chicago cultural community to develop a proposal to purchase 955 W. Grand Avenue in order to convert the historic home of the Chicago Commons into an art and social club. This occurred prior to SoHo House arriving in Chicago and before the widespread acceptance of such spaces as integral to social and cultural landscape. Together, we created preliminary plans, worked with building inspectors, architects, consultants, and preservation specialists, developed a business plan, recruited team members, managed fundraising, and managed the communications and marketing strategy.

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Walker Thisted Collaboration

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Thurn und Taxis

Thurn und Taxis was a club founded by Casey Miller, Kumar Atre, and Walker Thisted that was dedicated to sharing objects over a given period by circulating these objects in the city while recording the process and exploring the other objects and places that resulted. The practice aimed to shed new light on the value of objects and understand how those objects were given value through exchange, place, and relationship to those in possession of the object at a given time as well as the “owner” of the object. We hoped that this process might lead people to “own” fewer objects and for more objects to be cared for collectively. This experiment unfolded over three exchanges in New York and a final exchange in Berkeley, CA.

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