Janette Kim | Coral Courts Lecture
Janette Kim will deliver the 2025 Coral Courts Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
Kim is founding principal of All of the Above and co-director of the Urban Works Agency at the California College of the Arts Her practice — which ranges from buildings, books and board games to community and municipal partnerships — highlights the intersections of ecology, social equity and the built environment.
About Janette Kim
Janette Kim is associate professor at California College of the Arts, where she co-directs the Urban Works Agency, and founding principal of design firm All of the Above. Kim’s work focuses on the politics of ecology. She works in partnership with community-based organizations and municipal agencies to realize a more equitable redistribution of land and resources. Janette’s projects include the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge; the In It Together and Bartertown board games; The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform (Princeton Architectural Press 2015, with Erik Carver); the Safari audio tours on urban ecology (with Kate Orff and MTWTF); a hotel in Sichuan, China; the Pinterest headquarters (with First Office); and the National AIDS Memorial (with Chloe Town). Kim is currently working on her second book, which illustrates how activists and architects can work together to co-opt property law and foster a just and ecologically vibrant built environment
Equity Land Trusts
More Upcoming Lectures
Apr 15 at 5:30pm • Museum Lobby
Being and Becoming in Contemporary Chinese Art
This talk by Peggy Wang, associate professor of art history and Asian studies at Bowdoin College, addresses the conflicting pressures that artists in China confronted during the 1990s and early 2000s, including rapid urbanization and cultural globalization. Even as they navigated political constraints and deficits in resources, contemporary artists enacted productive strategies for making and exhibiting their art. This lecture foregrounds artists’ assertions of being and becoming, both as critical tactics for configuring identity and generative topics unto themselves. Wang will particularly examine how artists studied the vibrant dynamics of change through temporal, historical, and material dimensions in their art.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China, on view at the Kemper Art Museum from February 27 to July 27, 2026.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series