Symposia Archives - Public Seminar

When The New School Tried to Sell the Orozco Room

On the institutional amnesia that enables universities to treat artworks as fungible assets

June 16, 2026 • by Gil Bittner

Art has always been treated as an investment. The Italian Renaissance was bankrolled by patrons wishing to glorify God—and their own families and administrations. Today, blue-chip art buyers park their assets in storage lockers in tax-friendly free ports, openly treating art as capital rather than culture. Yet it feels different ...

When The New School Tried to Sell the Orozco Room

Rethinking Orozco

An Artwork Animated by Its Audience

The principles of dynamic symmetry behind José Clemente Orozco’s Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood

June 3, 2026 • by Xavier Moyssén Álvarez

—To my father, Xavier Moyssén Lechuga When José Clemente Orozco received a commission to paint a mural cycle at the New School for Social Research in late 1930, he was told that the murals would be on the walls of the student dining room. The room would have people moving in ...

Rethinking Orozco

If These Walls Could Talk

In a room at The New School, the revolutionaries are still arguing

May 14, 2026 • by Julia Foulkes

The public refuses TO SEE painting. They want TO HEAR painting. They don’t care for the show itself, they prefer TO LISTEN to the barker outside.— José Clemente Orozco, in Orozco “Explains” (1940) CAST IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Portrait of Joseph Stalin, revolutionary and leader of the Soviet Union: "Struggle in the ...

Rethinking Orozco

An Awful Color

A short story inspired by the history of the Orozco frescoes at The New School

May 6, 2026 • by Mary Karmelek

The New School for Social Research will keep indefinitely a yellow cotton curtain over the "Revolutionary Violence" section of a mural in the school's cafeteria by the late Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, because the painting "does not express the philosophy of the faculty," Dr. Hans Simons, president of the ...

Rethinking Orozco

A Landscape Inside a Tent

On embodied learning with José Clemente Orozco

May 1, 2026 • by Pascal Glissmann

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 ...

Rethinking Orozco

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

Migration

Migrants Are Parents and Children

New York parents are using mutual aid networks to welcome migrant families

October 31, 2024 • by Mónica Salmón Gómez

Although New York can be a violent, unequal, and segregated city, radical acts of solidarity through mutual aid groups shape the experiences of those who live there and strive to transform it into a more livable place—especially for new arrivals. In the winter of 2023, just as the migrant shelter ...

Democracy

Leaving Honduras

The legacy of US military and economic interference that continues to drive migration

October 31, 2024 • by Jeremy Robson and Leah Zamore

As US border policy grows ever more restrictive, the Biden-Harris administration’s “Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America” strategy is commendable for aiming to tackle the inhumane conditions in Central America that are causing so many people in the region to uproot in the first place. The strategy ...

Migration

Immigration and the US Presidential Election

A conversation on the US-Mexico border, inflammatory rhetoric, and policies that can serve migrants and citizens alike

October 30, 2024 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Alexandra Délano Alonso

Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have emphasized US-Mexico border security as one of the top concerns of their 2024 presidential campaigns. Why? In a conversation hosted by the New School for Social Research, Eugene Lang College, and the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, politics and global studies professor ...

Migration

Noncitizen Voting and the Politics of Common Sense in New York City

Can proposals to expand local voting to noncitizens survive in the era of Stop the Steal?

October 28, 2024 • by Vasiliki Malouchou Kanellopoulou and Connor Smith

Even as Republican politicians continue to undermine faith in the U.S. electoral system by erroneously claiming the 2024 election will be “stolen” by undocumented immigrants, the New York Court of Appeals is quietly considering a law that would expand the right to vote in local elections to certain residents of ...

Noncitizen Voting and the Politics of Common Sense in New York City

Migration

A Brief History of Travel Bans

What could follow a Trump victory in November?

October 25, 2024 • by Emmanuel Guerisoli

On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump promised retribution for the San Bernardino Isis attack in December 2015: he would enact a ban prohibiting the entry of Muslims into the country. It was, unfortunately, one of the campaign promises he made good on. In late January 2017, President Trump signed ...