A MUSEUM WITHIN A MUSEUM: PABLO DELANO AND THE COLONIAL HISTORY OF PUERTO RICO AT MASP

Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) presents Pablo Delano: o museu da antiga colonia (Pablo Delano: The Museum of the Old Colony). A visual artist and photographer known for his work with archives and the memory of Latin American and Caribbean peoples, Pablo Delano (Puerto Rico, 1954) offers a reflection on the political and social status of his homeland, considered the oldest colony in the world.

The exhibition is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director, and Fernando Oliva, curator, MASP. It centers on the project The Museum of the Old Colony, which brings together images, objects, and documents related to Puerto Rico’s colonial history, from Spanish rule to the island’s current status as an unincorporated territory of the United States. The installation functions as “a museum within a museum,” reproducing and, at the same time, questioning traditional ways of organizing, classifying, and presenting objects and images.

Enlarged historical photographs are mounted directly on the walls, without frames, alongside everyday objects such as bottles of Old Colony soda, a product created in the United States and now sold almost exclusively in Puerto Rico, which gives the exhibition its title.

Claimed by Spain in 1493 and transferred to US control in 1898 following the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico is today an “unincorporated territory” that belongs to the United States but is not part of it. Puerto Ricans were granted US citizenship in 1917; however, those who live on the island cannot vote in US presidential elections, among other restrictions. This ambiguity permeates Delano’s museum, which explores how photography, advertising, and everyday objects are used to construct stereotypes and promote an image of a “tropical paradise” that seeks to conceal exploitation and violence.

“Pablo Delano offers a different way of looking at the history of Puerto Rico and its colonization by the United States. It is certainly more critical, but also imbued with a certain wit and irony, as if to remind us that even denunciation and resistance can use humor as a viral and disruptive strategy,” says Oliva.

Puerto Rico’s history shares with Brazil’s a colonial and slaveholding past imposed on Indigenous and Black populations, which has left deep marks on the societies, economies, and cultures of both countries. “What resonance can the term ‘anticolonial’ have in Brazil today? This exhibition offers an opportunity to confront this dilemma,” says the curator.

The show engages with the anti-colonial project MASP has developed since its founding in the late 1940s, drawing on the ideas of Lina Bo Bardi and Pietro Maria Bardi. In 1968, the museum introduced the glass easels designed by Lina to display its collection, placing works from the European canon and those by Brazilian artists, including self-taught creators, on the same material, symbolic, and visual plane. According to Oliva, Delano’s work, like Lina’s in the 1960s, seems to ask what an art exhibition in a museum means today.

The exhibition was part of the 2024 Venice Biennale, curated by Pedrosa, and has previously been exhibited at institutions in Puerto Rico, the United States, Argentina, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. The exhibition is part of MASP’s annual program Latin American Histories.

Pablo Delano: o museu da antiga colônia is on view through January 31, 2027, at MASP, Avenida Paulista 1578, Bela Vista, São Paulo, Brazil.