Completed in mid-January 1931, Orozco’s mural cycle, "Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood," is a five part, socially-themed work created for the New School's building at 66 West Twelfth Street, designed in the International Style by Austrian architect Joseph Urban. The murals adorned the public dining room and an adjoining student lounge. In 2016 the murals remain, but the space, celebrated as the Orozco Room, is mainly used for special events. The mural cycle is the only surviving example of this Mexican fresco form in New York City.

Orozco's mural cycle expressed the values of the recent Socialist revolution in Mexico, from which Mexican Modernism was born, and fit into the vision of the New School's president, Alvin Johnson, who hoped that Urban's building would become a center for modernism, “broadly defined as artistic creativity, social research and democratic reform.” Seeking visibility, the painter proposed to donate the project for only the cost of expenses. Alvin Johnson wrote, “What could have been my feeling when Orozco, the greatest mural painter of our time, proposed to contribute a mural. All I could say was, ‘God bless you. Paint me the picture. Paint as you must. I assure you freedom.’”

Working in fresco, a technique of applying pigment onto freshly-prepared plaster, Orozco, working with his assistant, Lois Wilcox, had just forty-seven days to complete the murals. Five major works resulted: "Science, Labor, and Art" introduces the cycle (hallway); "Homecoming of the Worker of the New Day"; "Struggle in the Orient"; "Struggle in the Occident"; and "Table of Universal Brotherhood" (Orozco Room). The murals in the Orozco Room, two measuring some six feet by thirty feet, are interrupted only by the architectural details of doors and windows. His ultimate goal was to make the murals as much part of the life and function of the room as possible, suggesting a seamless relationship between contemporary mural art, architecture and daily life. As a member of the New York group, the Delphic Circle, Orozco embraced an ideal of universal brotherhood that reached "beyond politics and national interest, [and was] not limited by race, class, nation, or religion.”

The murals initially met with negative reviews. The public debate that followed (in part due to the depiction of an African-American seated at the head of the "Table of Universal Brotherhood") drew some 20,000 visitors in the first few months after the building opened. In the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, the New School administration elected to cover the portion of the panel that depicted Lenin and Stalin with a yellow curtain. Ultimately, student and faculty protests persuaded the administration to restore the murals to their original state.

In 2010, after overseeing a major restoration of the mural cycle, the New School Art Collection curators created an exhibition and series of programs, "Re-Imagining Orozco," that included a new commission from artist Enrique Chagoya and responses to the original murals by New School students from across the university.

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Rutkoff, Peter M. and William B. Scott. New School: A History of The New School for Social Research. London: Collier Macmillan; 1986.

Johnson, Alvin. Notes on The New School Murals. New York: The New School, 1941.

Dempsey, Ann. Mexican Muralists In Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, edited by Hal Foster. New York: Thames & Hudson; 2004.

Coffey, Mary K., Sharon Lorenzo, Lisa Mintz Messinger, Stephen Polcari. Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock. Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2012.