Pablo Delano’s exhibition unfolds as an experience that lingers long after you leave. Spanning two vast galleries, “The Museum of the Old Colony” at the New Britain Museum of American Art abandons the conventional in favor of immersion, drawing the viewer into a single, unfolding environment. Image and sound converge, flooding the senses with a narrative that is both unsettling, essential and impossible to ignore, telling the story of United States rule in Puerto Rico since 1898.
At its core, the exhibition is Delano’s meditation on representation, how Puerto Rico has been seen, framed and reimagined through the lens of popular media, and how those images shaped the lived consequences of its colonial status. His work moves with a quiet irony, yet refuses to comfort, asking the viewer not to simply observe, but to confront.
The title, “The Museum of the Old Colony”, carries a dark humor, a double entendre that speaks both to Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated United States territory, often regarded as one of the world’s oldest colonies, and to Old Colony soda, a familiar island staple. The title hints at the quiet persistence of colonial influence, embedded in ordinary parts of life. Beneath the familiarity of everyday objects lies something far more fraught, a material legacy marked by contradiction, where innocence gives way to histories that are tangled, distorted and deeply unsettling. Through these objects and installations, Delano reveals how meaning is layered and how the ordinary can conceal the weight of a ruling force.