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
Nov 11 at 5:30pm • Kemper Art Museum
Roots and Rhizomes: Relational Networks in the Art of Carolina Caycedo
In 2022, Carolina Caycedo stewarded the planting of an indigenous shadbush tree in a community garden in New York City’s East Harlem (El Barrio). This living organism, whose metaphorical seeds grew from Caycedo’s ongoing “Genealogy of Struggle” series, inspires Susanna V. Temkin’s exploration of the artist’s work within larger relational networks. Expanding ecological and symbolic concepts associated with roots, seeds, and branches, Temkin considers connections within Caycedo’s practice and across broader art histories of the Americas. In particular, Temkin will address connections to other artists in Caycedo’s work, along with broader histories of protest, ecofeminism, solidarity, and resistance.
This talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Carolina Caycedo: Growing Deep Roots”, as well as the forthcoming presentation of Confluencias at El Museo del Barrio, New York (originated at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo).
About the Speaker
Susanna V. Temkin is an art historian and the interim chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she has worked since 2018. Temkin earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research focused on modern art in the Americas, with a concentration on Cuba. At El Museo, her curatorial credits include the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, "Culture and the People" (2019), “La Trienal” (2020, 2024, and forthcoming 2027 edition), and the recent monograph of photographer Sophie Rivera (2026), among others. Prior to El Museo, she served as assistant curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues and publications and is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.