“Education as Resistance”: LA ESCUELA___’s Collective Learning Exhibition at MoMA PS1
The work of artist Laura Anderson Barbata explores the experience of the common.
© Rene Cervantes
For its first U.S. project, LA ESCUELA___ has been invited by MoMA PS1 to transform the museum’s Homeroom gallery into a collective learning environment. On view from November 6, 2025, to February 23, 2026, «Education as Resistance» foregrounds education as an experimental artistic practice, connecting socially engaged artists, researchers, and community organizations across the Americas. LA ESCUELA___ is an artist-run platform from Latin America, developed by artist Miguel Braceli and Foundation Siemens Stiftung since 2022.
LA ESCUELA___’s exhibition will transform the museum’s Homeroom gallery into a shared learning space that encompasses the platform’s four-year-long activity charting artistic pedagogies from across Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas. The program foregrounds education as an artistic practice and invites audiences, local socially engaged artists, and community organizations to participate. The public program features participatory projects, art education workshops, and a hybrid symposium connecting artists, researchers, communities, and cultural institutions across the Americas.
The exhibition positions education as a form of resistance—an ongoing practice of self-empowerment that challenges social injustice and colonial erasure, and expands collective narratives. It also situates Latin American and Latine activism and politics within hemispheric-level sociocultural contexts. The project is anchored by a growing community of thinkers, spaces, and radical pedagogies that contest the use of education as a tool for control; in turn, they address learning as an embodied, affective, everyday practice rooted in the territories.
These pedagogies from the South are now featured at MoMA PS1—a museum building housed in a former public school repurposed for creative experimentation since 1976. Particularly, they are framed within its Homeroom program, which is aimed at amplifying and celebrating this mission, inviting projects “to learn and unlearn, and to imagine ways of being that prioritize care and reciprocity.” Education as Resistance is organized by Elena Ketelsen González, Associate Curator, with Jolene Fernández, Homeroom Fellow, in collaboration with LA ESCUELA___.
Education as an Artistic Practice
The museum’s Homeroom and Classroom spaces will become an active site for knowledge exchange through works by existing and new collaborators of LA ESCUELA___. Rooted in ancestral knowledge, Laura Anderson Barbata (b. 1958, Mexico) presents flags dyed with natural pigments. Collective learning is empowered by Studio Lenca’s ( b. 1986, El Salvador) ongoing Rutas series, created in collaboration with migrants in New York, as well as Lizania Cruz’s ( b. 1983, Dominican Republic) participatory archive Cartelera project. Meanwhile, Miguel Braceli’s (b. 1983, Venezuela) Horizontal Chalkboard platform questions educational hierarchies and places pedagogy at the center of the exhibition.
A key piece is the affective-political-conceptual map of artists, thinkers, and curators that have informed LA ESCUELA___’s inquiry into historical and contemporary art and education practices in Latin America, designed by Ricardo Báez and developed by researchers Carolina Castro Jorquera and Manuel Vásquez Ortega. Whereas a two-channel video features a selection from the platform’s AULAS program archive, including projects by Esvin Alarcón Lam, Jessica Briceño Cisneros, Jorge Menna Barreto & Eloisa Brantes, Eleonora Fabião, DIADIA Arquitectura, Al Borde, Noqanchis, Grupo Silät, NOMASMETAFORAS, Colectiva Pumpumwayra, Ana Laura Cantera, Sallisa Rosa, José Ruiz, Carlos Fernández, and Mayra Vineya.
Education as Resistance will culminate in a Decentralized Symposium in February 2026, developed in collaboration with institutional partners including El Clemente (New York), Museo Universitario del Chopo (Mexico City), La Nueva Fábrica (Guatemala City), and Espacio Odeón (Bogotá). The program will foster hemispheric conversation through simultaneous physical gatherings and a public digital forum on Zoom.
Expanding Platform
LA ESCUELA___ has been fostering open learning spaces across Latin America and the Caribbean since 2022. It is an expanding platform that continues to grow as it weaves an international network of knowledge exchange, with a shared interest in creating collective learning experiences. Therefore, this unfolding into the U.S. advances their aim to connect artists, researchers, educators, communities, and institutions at the hemispheric level. As part of this mission, LA ESCUELA___ has recently opened a new U.S.-based not-for-profit initiative advocating for free access to art and education: La Escuela Inc., with board members including Madeline Murphy Turner and Antonieta Landa.
This exhibition at MoMA PS1 marks a new chapter for the platform, connecting its community in Latin America with new audiences in the U.S., inviting them to learn, make, and share different forms of knowledge and resistance together.
About LA ESCUELA___
LA ESCUELA___ is a transdisciplinary platform that operates as an international network of artist-run practices and collaborative-based educational models. It approaches education as an artistic practice and art as a pedagogical process. It advocates for open access to art and education, situates learning within real-life contexts, and responds to current social and ecological challenges through context-based creative practices.
