An exhibition by Trinity College faculty member Pablo Delano, Charles A. Dana Professor of Fine Arts, is opening this fall at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) in São Paulo, Brazil.
Delano’s installation, The Museum of the Old Colony, will be featured at MASP from October 30, 2026, to January 31, 2027. This is Delano’s first solo show in Brazil.
A visual artist and photographer known for his work with archives and the memory of Latin American and Caribbean peoples, Delano (Puerto Rico, 1954) offers, in this exhibition, a reflection on the political and social status of his homeland, considered the oldest colony in the world.
Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director, MASP, and Fernando Oliva, curator, MASP, this exhibition of Delano’s ongoing project, The Museum of the Old Colony, brings together images, objects, and documents related to Puerto Rico’s colonial history, from Spanish rule to the island’s current status as an unincorporated territory of the United States.
The Museum of the Old Colony was part of the 2024 Venice Biennale, curated by Pedrosa, and has previously been exhibited at institutions in Puerto Rico, the United States, Argentina, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. It was most recently at Connecticut’s New Britain Museum of Art in spring 2026.
The installation functions as “a museum within a museum,” reproducing and, at the same time, questioning traditional ways of organizing, classifying, and presenting objects and images. Historical photographs are enlarged and mounted directly on the walls, without frames, alongside everyday objects—such as bottles of Old Colony soda, a product created in the United States and now sold almost exclusively in Puerto Rico, which gives the exhibition its title.
“Pablo Delano offers a different way of looking at the history of Puerto Rico and its colonization by the United States,” said Oliva. “It is certainly more critical, but also imbued with a certain wit and irony, as if to remind us that even denunciation and resistance can use humor as a viral and disruptive strategy.”
Pablo Delano: The Museum of the Old Colony is part of MASP’s annual program dedicated to Latin American histories. The year’s program also includes exhibitions of works by Jesús Soto, Rosa Elena Curruchich, Manuel Herreros and Mateo Manaure, Carolina Caycedo, Sol Calero, Damián Ortega, Colectivo Acciones de Arte, Claudia Alarcón & Silät, La Chola Poblete, Santiago Yahuarcani, and Sandra Gamarra Heshiki.
Learn more about MASP and Delano’s exhibition here.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Pablo Delano was born in 1954 and grew up in Puerto Rico. He moved to the U.S. East Coast in the early 1970s to study art, settling in New York in 1979. He initially worked as a painter but soon turned to photography, a skill he inherited from his father, photographer Jack Delano. In 1996, Delano accepted a teaching position at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, which gave him the opportunity to travel to Trinidad and Tobago, in the southern Caribbean. He returned to the country many times over the following 10 years and, in 2008, published a book of black-and-white photographs titled In Trinidad, exploring the process of postcolonial nation-building. In the late 1990s, Delano began collecting archival images of Puerto Rico to address the island’s colonial status. This initiative gave rise to his installation The Museum of the Old Colony, which has been exhibited at museums around the world since 2016. In 2025, Delano presented the exhibition cuestiones caribeñas / caribbean matters at the Chazen Museum of Art in the United States, exploring Caribbean history and the realities shared by Caribbean territories.
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