The New School Archives - Public Seminar

Orozco’s Rainbow

An alchemical analysis

April 23, 2026 • by Jaime Arredondo

José Clemente Orozco’s first experience in the United States was colored by Jim Crow–era violence. At the border entrypoint of Laredo, Texas, guards burned 60 of the young artist’s drawings. This was 1917; it could have been worse. At least 124 people of Mexican descent were lynched in Texas between ...

Rethinking Orozco

How Alma Reed Triumphed Over “Positively Frightened” Critics of the Orozco Room

On the woman behind the brotherhood

April 17, 2026 • by John Reed

In January 1931, journalist and art-world impresario Alma Reed attended the unveiling of A Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood, a cycle of frescoes by José Clemente Orozco and the first mural commissioned for The New School's bespoke building in New York City's progressive haven of Greenwich Village. ...

How Alma Reed Triumphed Over “Positively Frightened” Critics of the Orozco Room

The Left

Publishing and Publics

Discussing the realities of political journalism in 2026

April 1, 2026 • by Natalie Adler, Hira Ahmed, Natasha Lennard, Edward Ongweso Jr, Matt Peterson, Nick Pinto and Colin Vanderburg

Friday the thirteenth felt like a fitting day to gather a group of independent writers and editors for a discussion on the current state of political publishing. On February 13, Natasha Lennard, Intercept columnist and Associate Director for the New School for Social Research’s Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism (CPCJ) MA program joined Matt ...

Fashion

At Parsons, Getting Dressed Is Extra Homework

“What should I wear?”

March 10, 2025 • by Hannah McIntyre

In my first semester at Parsons School of Design, I sat in the library, dazedly looking around at other students’ outfits. I noticed someone wearing a denim beret with a long-sleeved white shirt that had images of bones, forming a skeleton laid on their back. They wore a long black ...

At Parsons, Getting Dressed Is Extra Homework

The New School

Remembering Michael E. Gellert

Not just a benefactor but a friend, this émigré from Central European knew that the act of listening was the future of democracy

August 23, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

_____ One of the great honors of my life was to be named the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology in May of 1999. At the time, I was very pleased because it recognized the value of my scholarship, teaching and service to the New School and the broader public. But ...

The New School

A Sanctuary from Double Betrayal

What The New School could do for its students from China

June 28, 2021 • by Mark Larrimore and Lei Ping

_____ The New School has one of the most international student bodies of American universities, including students from many Asian countries. Asian international students are celebrated among the graduates and alumnae/i, especially of Parsons School of Design, but while studying here they often find curricula that marginalize their traditions and ignore ...

Higher Ed

A Relevant Education

The New School in the 1960s

February 12, 2021 • by Howard Kirschenbaum

———— After such a vital summer of civil rights work in Mississippi in 1964, I could not see returning to the ivory tower of Johns Hopkins, where most academic courses seemed to have no relevance to the real world issues that concerned me. Shortly after returning from the Democratic National Convention ...

The New School

Reckoning with The New School’s Legacies

A comprehensive view reveals entrenched inequities

February 8, 2021 • by Julia Foulkes

_____ What The New School was, is, and could be, has long been contested, often by those who care the most about it. The institution has a convoluted and sometimes contradictory past. It is an amalgamation of parts and histories, a place of stops and starts, sometimes an alternative to traditional ...

Reckoning with The New School’s Legacies

Education

Why The New School Will Survive

An imprudent venture in historical context

October 22, 2020 • by Judith Friedlander

Ginia Bellafante is not the first reporter at The New York Times to call attention to the serious financial troubles of The New School. Since its founding in 1919, the university has repeatedly faced major budgetary shortfalls, the details of which the Times has faithfully and dramatically recorded. Each time, The ...

The New School

Realizing The New School

A downloadable collection of essays documents lessons from the past as a university looks to its future

September 10, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

A century later, the experiment has become an institution, one different in almost every way from the one originally proposed. Psychology and the arts quickly redefined what “social research” could be. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences and the rise of fascism inspired The New School’s president to establish a ...

The New School

Albert Mayer’s Urban Village: Between The New School and India

A global conversation about using design to foster community

July 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

The New School does not look like most other universities, even those in large cities. It has no college green around which buildings are situated; no common architectural style; no grand monument-like buildings with Latin phrases carved into granite. Instead, it is a disaggregated collection of buildings, most in the ...

History

The New School’s Leading Man

How Alvin Johnson reimagined higher education

June 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

Alvin Johnson is the leading man in the history of The New School. He saved it from financial failure again and again and again; he attracted intellectuals to its faculty, most auspiciously those fleeing fascist Europe in the 1930 and 40s and he persuaded artists such as Thomas Hart Benton ...