The New School Orozco Room, five-panel mural cycle by José Clemente Orozco, fresco (1930–31) with ”Table of Universal Brotherhood” and ”Struggle in the Occident” panels | © Martin Seck, 2009 / Courtesy of The New School Art Collection
I tilt my head slightly, eyes narrowing in focus. I take two steps back. Then forward again—my feet almost touching the wall, my fingers tempted to touch the surface: pigment, paint, and the silver efflorescence populating at the edges. As I shift toward the opposite wall, I become aware of my body’s movement—its choreography within this particular space. In that moment, I feel prompted, almost physically nudged, by the mural itself—or rather, by its artist. José Clemente Orozco’s monumental fresco series—encompassing “Science, Labor and Art,” “Homecoming of the Worker of the New Day,” “Struggle in the Orient,” “Struggle in the Occident,” and “Table of Universal Brotherhood” (1931)—seems to orchestrate my motion almost a hundred years after it came into the world. It prompts through color, scale, texture, and rhythm. Stretching across all four walls of the room, the mural surrounds the viewer completely, creating an immersive environment that demands not just looking but physical orientation and movement. “Homecoming,” the largest work, measures 6.5 x 32 feet; “Struggle in the Orient” and “Struggle in the Occident” are both 6.5 x 30.7 feet; “Science” and “Table,” the narrowest of the bunch, both measure 6.5 x 14.5 feet. Simply viewing these works requires my body and makes a claim on my attention before I’ve even formed a question.
In her book Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Laura U. Marks calls this form of kinetic looking haptic visuality: a visual experience where “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch.” In front of the mural, my perception is not just retinal but embodied. The scale of the work, its painted surface embedded in the wall, activates a multisensory form of attention. As an educator, I find this moment quietly radical. In an era when learning often unfolds on screens—disembodied, asynchronous, pixelated—the mural’s physical insistence stands in opposition. The prompting effect of the mural has nothing to do with keyboards or command lines or data fed into a generative algorithm. It resists the flicker of Google Slides projected in classrooms and the addictive scroll on our phones. It slows things down and demands presence.
As I observe myself moving through the Orozco room, I begin to wonder about those who stood here before me. Did their bodies move in the same ways? Generations of students and faculty—their gestures forming a quiet choreography across time. In this speculation, the walls do not simply preserve; they witness. They archive through observation and engage us with their language of revolution, solidarity, labor, and abstraction.
The everyday leaves its mark on the mural. Salt blooms across its surface. Water stains its edges. These nonhuman forces remind us that time acts not only on meaning but on material. The mural is decomposing. It archives itself through decay, slowly, imperceptibly. After nearly a century, the signs are visible. What will remain in another hundred years? Its survival depends on our sustained and attentive care.
Orozco may not have known how his work would age. But when he embedded this painting within a university, he didn’t just create an image—he built a temporal infrastructure. Rooted in an educational institution, the mural takes on a future-oriented role. It becomes a site of return, of rereading, of reinterpretation. It is less a statement than an invitation—a proposition for a future that cannot yet be fully known. In this way, the mural resonates unexpectedly with the principles of landscape design.
Consider the act of planting a park. The designer might anticipate certain uses, but the actual life of a landscape unfolds over decades, shaped by weather, human habits, and slow ecological growth. Trees mature. Paths form and fade. Late in life Frederick Law Olmsted, cocreator of New York City’s Central and Prospect parks, expressed a need for patience for what he called the distant effect: “I have all my life been considering distant effects, and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future.” Central Park, now more than 150 years old, is not simply a design—it is a living system shaped by time. Anne Whiston Spirn, photographer, landscape architect, and author, extends this idea in her book The Language of Landscape: “A coherence of human vernacular landscapes emerges from dialogues between builders and place, fine-tuned over time.” Like murals, landscapes are durational forms. Their significance is shaped by how they are used, maintained, and inhabited.
But here’s the twist: While landscape embraces change and decay as part of its life cycle, the mural relies on human attention. It needs us to keep asking what it means. Institutions often freeze murals in place, resisting their erosion. And yet students—the actual future the mural may have been painted for—change radically; they carry new values, visual languages, and modes of critique. The mural is now read against radically different horizons than in 1931. It demands that institutions design encounters with it—like those initiated through Silvia Rocciolo’s pedagogical interventions with students. It asks education to make space for ambiguity, for lingering in the unknown. To look at something and say: We don’t fully understand this yet. Let’s stay with it.
The comparison between mural and landscape can help us understand education itself as a temporal practice—one that prepares for futures we cannot predict. Yet one key distinction may lie in physicality. The COVID-19 pandemic and the rising cost of urban life have forced institutions to rethink the necessity of physical space. We now design global classrooms in the cloud, share prompts and syllabi across time zones. But we also miss being in a room together. The haptics of learning—its spatial and sensory dimensions—still matter. So we must ask: What role does physical space play in education today? Can it still support embodied, collective, experimental learning—the kind murals, landscapes, and institutions once made possible? Or does it limit us?
John Andrew Rice, founder of Black Mountain College, believed schools should be like tents—taken down after a decade to prevent stagnation and loss of relevance. In a warning quoted in The New Designer: Design as a Profession, he cautions: “Any idea, no matter how humane, no matter how progressively-minded, would sink into the institution within ten years.” His vision was one of impermanence and reinvention. What does it mean to conserve a fresco (and the walls it’s painted into) inside an institution committed to experimentation and progress?
Perhaps the answer lies not in choosing between tent and wall but in allowing room for both. The tent allows for renewal. The mural anchors us in a legacy and gives students a base from which to question the present. Here, Orozco’s mural accomplishes something remarkable: It holds its form while letting go of fixed meaning. Its visual logic—its dynamic symmetry—offers a rhythm that can be felt before it’s understood. As identified in Jay Hambidge’s early twentieth-century thesis of the same name, dynamic symmetry organizes space with proportion and balance. In Orozco’s work, these principles are not ornamental; they model a political worldview. Science, art, and design are never neutral—they are always in dialogue with the human struggles Orozco’s figures embody. The revolutionary, the intellectual, the worker—all held in rhythmic opposition, yet linked in a shared visual grammar.
In 1959, nearly 30 years after Orozco painted his mural at The New School, John Cage introduced a course called “Mushroom Identification,” taught in collaboration with botanist Guy Nearing. What may have begun as a personal passion project became, in the eyes of then-dean Clara Mayer, a pedagogical experiment—an opportunity, according to the original course announcement from 1959, for students to cultivate “their powers of observation in a way rarely afforded in urban centers.” Education, in this spirit, is not about producing finished professionals, but about nurturing each student’s capacity to design their own mode of inquiry. That requires contact. It requires the friction of the physical. And it calls for the preservation of spaces—murals, parks, and other slow forms—that teach us to pause, observe deeply, and be transformed.
Since visiting the mural, I’ve come to see the city itself as an educational ecology—an assemblage of sites that teach through presence. Parks, murals, libraries, sidewalks—am I open to their prompts? They all hold memory. They all require attention. And in return, they offer what is urgently needed to disrupt our habitual ways of seeing and unsettle certainty: perspective, time, and embodied experience—tools for facing an unknown future.
This essay is part of a series of interdisciplinary responses to Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco’s 1931 mural cycle A Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood. The mural, one of The New School’s earliest commissioned artworks and the only surviving permanently installed public example of classic Mexican fresco painting in New York City, is currently the subject of a multi-year conservation project that will see its surface restored and environmental conditions stabilized for years to come. While conservators prepare to gently treat the efflorescence clouding Orozco’s imagery, Public Seminar has invited scholars from across The New School to look at the artwork with fresh eyes.
The preservation effort has been made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation, Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
