The Museum of the Old Colony: An Art Installation by Pablo Delano, on view at the New Britain Museum of American Art from March 14 to July 5, 2026, is an ambitious, immersive work that challenges how history is constructed, displayed, and absorbed. Conceived as a fictional yet unsettlingly familiar institution, the installation invites visitors to step inside a museum that mirrors the authoritative language of official archives while quietly unraveling their assumptions. Through this layered environment, Delano confronts the enduring realities of colonial power and cultural memory as they relate to Puerto Rico and its complex relationship with the United States.
Rather than presenting discrete artworks, Delano assembles a dense constellation of archival photographs, printed matter, moving images, and found objects that function together as a single evolving artwork. Drawing on the visual strategies of ethnographic and historical museums, the installation reveals how narratives are framed, legitimized, and preserved. Humor and irony play a crucial role, softening the surface while sharpening the critique, as familiar museological devices become tools for questioning authority rather than reinforcing it.
The title’s double meaning underscores the work’s conceptual depth, referencing both Puerto Rico’s political status as a long-standing colony and a locally produced soft drink embedded in everyday life. This blend of the personal and the political reflects Delano’s own biography and lived experience, grounding broader historical analysis in individual memory. At the New Britain Museum of American Art, the project expands to include materials connected to Connecticut’s Puerto Rican diaspora, weaving regional stories into a global history of displacement, resistance, and cultural persistence.
As the largest presentation of the project to date, this installation transforms multiple galleries into a space for reflection and dialogue. It resists closure, encouraging viewers to linger with ambiguity and reconsider what museums choose to show, and what they omit. In doing so, Delano positions art as an active form of historical inquiry—one that does not merely document the past, but interrogates how it continues to shape the present.
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Previous Installation of 'The Museum of the Old Colony: An Art Installation by Pablo Delano'