Wednesday, September 17 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L160
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Pablo Delano was born in 1954 in Puerto Rico, a colonial possession of the United States in the Caribbean. He and his sister were raised on a hillside just outside the capital city of San Juan, near the town of Trujillo Alto. As a child, he enjoyed climbing a huge flamboyán tree and savoring a spectrum of fresh tropical fruits. After completing high school, he relocated to the U.S. East Coast to study art. He holds a BFA from Tyler School of Art and an MFA from Yale University, both in painting.
In 1979 he moved to New York City, where he initially pursued a career as a painter, but quickly turned to photography, a skill he had learned from his father, the photographer Jack Delano, and which he felt offered him a more interactive connection to the world. Substantial projects grew out of his work done on the Lower East Side, including commissions from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Ellis Island National Immigration Museum. One unifying thread was a consistent interest in the lives and experiences of Latin American and Caribbean communities, both in their homelands and in the diaspora.
In 1996, Delano accepted a teaching position at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut, where a colleague offered him the opportunity to travel to Trinidad and Tobago, in the Southern Caribbean. Fascinated by that nation’s process of post-colonial nation-building, he returned countless times over the next 10 years, ultimately producing a book of black-and-white art photographs titled In Trinidad (Ian Randle Publishers, 2008). This is the first photographic book to explore issues of post-colonial Trinidadian identity primarily through visual means. A subsequent photographic monograph, Hartford Seeen (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), focused on the Caribbean character and vernacular structures of Connecticut’s capital city.
During the late 1990s, Delano began collecting archival images of Puerto Rico and conceptualizing a methodology whereby he could employ those images in his practice to address the colonial status the island. The resulting project grew into his conceptual art installation, The Museum of the Old Colony (MotOC). The project was first exhibited in 2016 at Alice Yard, an experimental art lab in Port of Spain. It has grown into a vast, immersive, site-specific installation that includes not only large-scale reproduced photographs but objects, tableaus and video pieces. A early version of MotOC from 2017 is held in the permanent collection of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in San Juan. Most recently, MotOC was included in the 60th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa under the theme Foreigners Everywhere.
Delano continues to develop, expand and adapt MotOC for future venues while working on other projects, such as a series of individual assemblages titled cuestiones caribeñas / caribbean matters, taking his examination of the complexities of the Caribbean condition into ever more transgressive territory.
Delano currently serves as the Charles A. Dana Professor of Fine Arts at Trinity College, and is a co-founder of Trinity’s Center for Caribbean Studies. His exhibition cuestiones caribeñas/caribbean matters: assemblage and sculpture is currently on display at the Chazen Museum of Art through December 14th, with the Exhibition Celebration on Friday, September 19th at 5pm. pablodelano.com