Trinity College reports that Pablo Delano, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Fine Arts, is opening his first solo exhibition in Brazil this fall at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP).

The installation, *The Museum of the Old Colony*, runs from October 30, 2026 to January 31, 2027, curated by MASP artistic director Adriano Pedrosa and MASP curator Fernando Oliva.

According to Trinity College, the ongoing project assembles images, objects, and documents tied to Puerto Rico's colonial history — from Spanish rule to its current status as an unincorporated U.S. territory — with the show forming part of MASP's annual program dedicated to Latin American histories.

The unexpected pleasure in a show about 'the oldest colony in the world' is its humor.

Trinity College quotes MASP curator Fernando Oliva saying Delano offers 'a different way of looking at the history of Puerto Rico and its colonization by the United States,' one that is 'more critical, but also imbued with a certain wit and irony.'

Oliva adds that the work reminds us 'even denunciation and resistance can use humor as a viral and disruptive strategy.'

The title itself is a joke with teeth: bottles of Old Colony soda — an American-made product now sold almost exclusively in Puerto Rico — hang alongside enlarged historical photographs mounted directly on walls without frames.

Per Trinity College, *The Museum of the Old Colony* is no debut experiment.

It appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale — curated by the same Adriano Pedrosa — and has previously been exhibited at institutions in Puerto Rico, the United States, Argentina, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, most recently at Connecticut's New Britain Museum of Art in spring 2026.

Trinity College notes the installation deliberately reproduces and questions traditional museum ways of organizing, classifying, and presenting objects and images.

Delano, born in Puerto Rico in 1954 and the son of photographer Jack Delano, began collecting archival images of Puerto Rico in the late 1990s, a project that gave rise to the installation, shown around the world since 2016.

For readers of the art world, the show lands amid a broader fight over visibility. Delano's MASP appearance shares a season with exhibitions of Jesús Soto, Carolina Caycedo, Sol Calero, Damián Ortega, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki and others, per Trinity College.

Meanwhile, The Art Newspaper reports that Paris luxury-house Maison Guerlain just opened *L'Heure des Possibles* — 33 artists including James Turrell and Annette Messager — even as riots scarred the Champs-Elysées, with its art director Ann-Carolin Prazan saying, 'We need a moment of blue after all the black.'

Both stories show institutions insisting culture must go on: Guerlain stayed open through the unrest, and Delano's museum-within-a-museum asks who gets to frame history at all.

Trinity College reports that Delano's 2025 exhibition *cuestiones caribeñas / caribbean matters* at the Chazen Museum of Art explored Caribbean history and the realities shared by Caribbean territories, so the MASP run extends a sustained Caribbean turn in his career.

With the exhibition on view in São Paulo through January 31, 2027, it becomes the first Brazilian audience for a project that has circled the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe since 2016.

Trinity College notes Delano has taught at Trinity College in Hartford since 1996 and published *In Trinidad* in 2008 — a decade of photographic work on postcolonial nation-building that set the template for treating archives as living political argument.