The Schoolhouse and the Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy and Engagement serves as a document of two intersecting projects by leading practitioners of socially engaged art, Suzanne Lacy and Pablo Helguera. Since the early 1970s, Los Angeles artist, writer and professor Suzanne Lacy has been staging performance-based interventions that engage with social themes and urban issues, advocating for radical political change. Profoundly influenced by Lacy, New York-based Pablo Helguera represents the next generation of socially engaged artists. Through his performances, installations, exhibitions and writings he addresses history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography and memory.

Comprising text, photography, installation, collage, video and archival documentation, The School of Panamerican Unrest and The Skin of Memory/La Piel de la Memoria are representative of two seminal works by Helguera and Lacy (with anthropologist Pilar Riano-Alcala). Collectively these works incorporate many overlapping themes in the artists' practices, including immigration, race and social organisation, while more generally proving the efficacy and importance of socially engaged art today.