Art 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

Art & Design

The Good Word According to Sister Corita Kent

On how a Catholic school teacher became a radical proponent of activist art

June 15, 2026 • by Julie Allan

Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, a monograph first published by DelMonico Books in 2013 and now reissued, after a decade out of print, provides a look back at a Catholic school art teacher’s journey to become one of the most visible activist artists of the 1960s and ...

The Good Word According to Sister Corita Kent

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 ...

Art & Design

The Avant-Garde Intersection of Léon-Paul Fargue and Marie Monnier

Translating the “great nocturnal butterflies in broad daylight” of one modernist recognizing another

May 4, 2026 • by Chris Holdaway

Translator’s Note In May 1927, an exhibition of images embroidered in silk thread opened at La Maison des Amis des Livres in the Sixth Arrondissement, the bookshop and salon that Breton once called “the most attractive hub of ideas of the time.” The artworks were the creations of Marie Monnier (1894–1976) ...

The Avant-Garde Intersection of Léon-Paul Fargue and Marie Monnier

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 ...

Music

Hold Onto This

Why young queer artists and music lovers are turning again to physical media like zines and tapes

March 25, 2026 • by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

For Rox Eckroth and August Simon, the idea of putting together a tape compilation of songs from trans artists came as much from their interest in the history of cassettes as it did from a desire to collate trans art. “You put a tape in the machine, you hit play. It ...

Art & Design

Joanna Walsh’s E-Elegy

Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters offers a remembrance of posts past

December 10, 2025 • by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

Here’s a theory: The posts, tags, and profiles that constitute the internet are all works of art, produced by amateur artists. Whether or not these amateurs recognize their work’s “artiness” is irrelevant; participation on the internet requires acts of intentional creation and studied self-representation, with the express purpose of display, ...

Democracy

It May Be the Last Time

Lithuanian art and culture resisting a takeover at the height of hybrid warfare

November 10, 2025 • by Edvardas Šumila

Recent developments in Lithuanian politics have produced a decisive, immediate, and spontaneous resistance from culture workers in various fields. The formation of a new coalition government led to the populist political project Nemuno Aušra (NA)—headed by the antisemitic politician Remigijus Žemaitaitis—being given control of the Ministry of Culture. Žemaitaitis has ...

Film & Performing Arts

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Blame it on Mommy and Daddy

October 10, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

It’s almost as if the selection committee for the recently ended sixty-third New York Film Festival (NYFF) was acknowledging that giants no longer walk the cinematic earth when it chose to screen Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Both directors are among the most important of American ...

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Art & Design

Imperfect Images

Sohrab Hura on slowing down time in a survey show at MoMA PS1

October 2, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves and Sohrab Hura

Sohrab Hura began his career in film and photography documenting social issues across India and has been a full-time member of Magnum Photos since 2020. Over the years, his practice has expanded to include publishing, drawing, and writing in an ongoing investigation into the relationship between the personal and the ...

Art & Design

Rethinking Empathy

A review of Imperfect Solidarities by Aruna D’Souza

March 4, 2025 • by Elide Vincenti

A deceptively simple question animates Imperfect Solidarities (Floating Opera Press, 2024), a short new book by writer and art critic Aruna D’Souza: “What would it mean if our politics were based not on our ability to empathize with people whose experiences are distant from our own, but on our willingness ...