Pablo Delano’s “The Museum of the Old Colony”

Pablo Delano has presented “The Museum of the Old Colony” in contexts ranging from the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in San Juan to Adriano Pedrosa’s international exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennale. The adaptable installation functions as a single artwork in the tradition of immersive museography or the Gesamtkunstwerk, combining archival photographs, newsreels, and press clippings with toys, souvenirs, books, furniture, and sculptures. The materials are selected and carefully arranged by the artist to make a pseudo-exhibition about the fraught history of Puerto Rico, which has been under US colonial rule since the Spanish-American War of 1898—“a territory appurtenant and belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States,” as described in a 1901 Supreme Court decree.

This presentation at the New Britain Museum of American Art is Delano’s largest to date and the closest to his hometown of Hartford, where he has lived since the 1990s, having previously emigrated from Puerto Rico to study in the northeast. The work has been smartly re-contextualized in the oldest museum dedicated exclusively to American art, whose roots date back to 1853. It finds an added layer of resonance with the city’s and state’s significant Puerto Rican population, one of the largest concentrations in North America thanks to migration fueled by many of the economic and political factors that surface in the exhibition.

The title contains a second meaning legible only to those in the know: Old Colony is the brand name of a popular Puerto Rican soda. This double entendre signals the interpretive slippage and dark humor that define Delano’s approach. The walls of several galleries have been filled with blown-up archival photographs of Puerto Rico and its inhabitants, many of them produced by US government agencies for North American consumption. Some perpetuate tropical or exotic stereotypes of the territory, while others market the land as ripe for investment and exploitation, characterizing Puerto Ricans as uneducated but industrious in their racist captions. These narratives are mordantly dramatized by objects Delano has placed near some of the photos: a Puerto Rican Barbie doll surrounded by media representations of Puerto Rican beauty queens and women laborers, for example, or a kit to build your own miniature casita de campo, a traditional rural home, underneath a report on the “unsolvable problem” of Puerto Rican slums.

The exhibition’s most memorable moments come when Delano relies on formal imagination rather than the power of the source materials. A tabletop is covered with green books about Puerto Rican nature and geography (one disturbingly titled Our New Possessions: The Philippines, Porto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii) that Delano has arranged in the rough shape of the island; atop this he has placed golf balls and plastic toy soldiers, creating a diorama that humorously evokes the tourism and militarism that have defined American occupation. Nearby, the artist has installed an antique elementary school desk and 1940s English textbooks, speaking to the many decades when English-only education was enforced on the island. These vignettes where childlike play tactics address painful legacies allow viewers to feel like they are in on the joke, even if they are also implicated by its punchline.

Some of the archival images selected by Delano celebrate folk heroes who dared to challenge the colonial narrative. A news photo of Lolita Lebrón, the pro-independence activist who carried out a famous armed attack on Capitol Hill in 1954, hangs alongside a photo of the Puerto Rican flag draped from the Statue of Liberty’s crown, where it was unfurled during a 1977 occupation by nationalists. For this iteration, Delano added the FBI “wanted” poster for Víctor Manuel Gerena, who grew up in Connecticut and pulled off the legendary 1983 Wells Fargo heist in nearby West Hartford, stealing 7 million dollars for the independentista cause and eluding capture to this day.

There are essentially no traditional labels or explanatory wall texts within the installation itself, so it is up to each viewer to make whatever connections they can or want to. When I saw the version of the museum Delano created for the Venice Biennale, I found the experience a bit unsettling. Of course, the images themselves and their many derogatory captions were painful to look at, but the discomfort came more from watching the hordes of tourists pouring through the galleries, stopping briefly to observe and perhaps take a photograph before moving on. Had Delano done enough to interrupt these problematic images? Was he perhaps extending their damaging reach? 

Here, this ambivalence feels decidedly more productive, as multiple damning introductory texts cue viewers to interpret everything in the exhibition as direct evidence of American policies and attitudes that have kept the island subjugated for more than 125 years. Further, one of the texts characterizes Delano’s museographic approach as an indictment of museums—alongside other often well-intentioned “powerful storytellers”—for perpetuating stereotypical narratives about Puerto Rico. This artwork does not spare the visitors who pay to see it, either, offering an absorbing, troubling experience that cannot be passively consumed.