José Clemente Orozco Archives

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

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 ...

The New School

Hanging in Union Square

H. T. Tsiang and the New School

May 28, 2020 • by Mark Larrimore

Among the challenges facing the New School in the coming years will be navigating the increasingly charged relationship between the United States and China. Links with students and partners in China are a significant part of the life of the New School, but not our institutional storytelling. To counter likely ...

Art & Design

The Writing on the Wall

Orozco, Benton, and Arnautoff

September 25, 2019 • by Jennifer Wilson

Student and activist groups have campaigned for the removal of the murals, arguing they were detrimental to the education and well-being of students of color, who had to confront these images as they walked the halls or ascended the staircase. On the other side of the debate, art historians and ...

Education

Dynamic Symmetry: A Mathematical Structure in New School History

While Orozco’s murals now speak of the past, students at Parsons today continue to learn about the Modular sequence in architecture and other courses.

May 15, 2019 • by Jennifer Wilson

In his autobiography, José Clemente Orozco described his murals at the New School for Social Research as an opportunity to investigate the “geometric-aesthetic principles of the investigator Jay Hambidge.” Hambidge, an aspiring writer, was the inventor and proselytizer of a newly-popular compositional theory, Dynamic Symmetry. Orozco learned of Hambidge’s ideas through his ...

Dynamic Symmetry: A Mathematical Structure in New School History

Feature

Exiled Knowledge Salvaged for World Use

The histories hidden in the New School’s digital archives

October 10, 2018 • by Mark Larrimore

The histories of an iconoclastic institution aren’t easy to trace. The New School has always been diffuse, porous and underfunded. Until recently, The New School didn’t even have an archive. So the fifty-seven volumes of publicity scrapbooks maintained by a clipping service for the school’s first several decades -- and ...