In 1957, Gonzalo Fonseca was invited to submit a proposal and was later commissioned by New School president Hans Simons to create a site-specific work in the lobby of the new building expansion at 66 West Twelfth Street. The mural mosaic was one of Fonseca’s first public commissions in New York. Working in his studio between 1959 and 1961, Fonseca used Italian mosaic tiles. This is one of Fonseca's few mosaic works (he typically worked in media such as painting and woodcarving, and later became known for his stone carvings and large-scale sculpture). He received a fee of $6,000 from the New School for the commission.

Fonseca’s commission was an example of the New School’s commitment to representing Latin-American art. In 1960, the New School granted a two-year fellowship to another member of the Torres-García workshop, Augusto Torres. The same year, while working on the mosaic, Fonseca brought an exhibition of the members of El Taller Torres-García to the New School. To members of the New School community like Nicholas Birns, Fonseca’s mosaic served as an aesthetic indicator of a new era, “juxtaposing the fantastic and the real, the universal and the accidental.” The work greatly reflected the influence on Fonseca of Joaquín Torres-García and his concept of Universal Constructivism--“symbols within squares,” as Fonseca described it. The mosaic also reflects Fonseca’s interest in the memory embedded in Peruvian, Greek and Middle Eastern archeological sites, ancient cultures and written languages.

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Birns, Nicholas. “Growing Up at The New School in the 1960s and 70s,” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, accessed Ocober 9, 2015 http://www.coha.org/growing-up-at-the-new-school-in-the-1960s-and-70s-2/.

Buzio del Torres, Cecilia. “The School of the South: El Taller Torres-García, 1943-1962.” In El Taller Torres-García: the School of the South and its Legacy, edited by Mari Carmen Ramírez. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992, 110.

Perazzo, Nelly. “Constructivism and Geometric Abstraction.” In The Latin American Spirit : Art and Artists in the United States, 1920-1970, edited by Luis R. Cancel, 106-151. New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts in association with H.N. Abrams, 1988, 126.