Trinity Professor’s Art Installation Comes to Connecticut Museum

An exhibition by a Trinity College faculty member that has been presented around the world is coming to a Connecticut museum this spring. The Museum of the Old Colony, an art installation by Professor of Fine Arts Pablo Delano, opens March 14, 2026, at the New Britain Museum of American Art. Through archival photography, texts, and sculptural objects, the exhibition “confronts the complex legacies of U.S. colonial rule in Puerto Rico since the occupation of 1898,” according to the museum.

The site-specific installation has evolved through multiple iterations since 2016, including a recent presentation as part of the 60th International Art Exhibition of the 2024 Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy. See a video about Delano at the Biennale here.

Each time he presents the installation, Delano adapts the work to its local context. “Here in Connecticut, I’m adding a lot of material that relates directly to the Puerto Rican community and the history of Puerto Ricans in Connecticut,” said Delano, who was born in Puerto Rico. “So that’s all new material for this version of the show.”

Delano’s engagement with the project began in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he started collecting photographs, books, and printed materials that he said were part of a coordinated effort meant to justify the United States’ new territorial acquisitions and portray the country as a benevolent colonizer. He collected these materials in the form of either physical objects or online records.

At the time, Delano—who was trained as a painter—was primarily focused on documentary photography. Still, he said he knew that one day the collection would form the basis of something larger.

A second turning point came in 2015, when Puerto Rico’s governor declared the island’s debt unpayable. The following year, then-President Barack Obama signed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), imposing a federal fiscal control board over Puerto Rico’s finances. The board prioritized repaying Wall Street lenders, Delano said, instituting austerity measures that closed hundreds of public schools, reduced funding to the University of Puerto Rico, and privatized many public utilities.

“This was when I felt that it was time for me and my art to shift to a more direct and blunt confrontation with the situation that my country was experiencing,” Delano said.

“Sometimes people confuse [the installation] with a historical exhibit, but it’s not that at all,” Delano added. “It’s a very personal retelling of a story through my eyes, my lived experience, and through a carefully chosen set of materials assembled in a way that provokes people to question and think about this colonial condition that we live in.”

The title of the exhibit, The Museum of the Old Colony, is in part an ironic reference to Old Colony soda, which Delano recalls from his childhood in Puerto Rico. Delano said that the grape-flavored beverage—despite grapes not growing on the island—features a Revolutionary War soldier on its label. For Delano, the soda became a metaphor for colonial consumption: an imported product wrapped in militaristic symbolism, embraced without questioning its implications.

That irony extends to the exhibition’s structure. Delano explained that the installation adopts the authoritative aesthetic of traditional museums while subtly subverting it. For instance, Delano said he used gold pushpins to mount images instead of the gold frames typically used to signal artistic value. Gold, once violently extracted from the Americas by European colonizers, Delano said, becomes both material and critique in his work.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Amanda J. Guzmán served as a consulting curator and a contributor to the exhibition catalogue, which also features essays by Elena Rosario, assistant professor of history at Fairfield University, and Laura Bravo López, professor of art history at the University of Puerto Rico.

“As an anthropologist deeply concerned with the relationship between cultural institutions and objects, I was fascinated by his work,” Guzmán said of Delano’s installation. “This exhibition invites students to recognize that these interconnected histories are not abstract or distant. They remain present in the institutions we inhabit, the objects we encounter, and the communities we belong to today.”

The exhibition also inaugurates the New Britain Museum of American Art’s newly launched three-year “Puerto Rico in Focus” initiative, signaling a sustained institutional commitment to engaging Puerto Rican histories, artists, and communities.

“Beyond any single exhibition, it represents a longer-term investment in cultural visibility and critical reflection,” Guzmán said. “Given Trinity’s location in Hartford, it is especially important that the campus community serve as active interlocutors in this work.”

Sonia Cardenas, Trinity’s vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty, said that the College community is excited to celebrate the opening of Delano’s installation. “Professor Delano has garnered global attention for this thought-provoking exhibit, which he continually adapts to benefit the local context,” Cardenas said. “We are especially proud that this work will now be showcased at the New Britain Museum of American Art.”

An opening reception for Delano’s exhibition will be held Thursday, March 12, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Admission to the reception is free with advance registration. The Museum of the Old Colony will be on display through July 5, 2026.