 hundreds of people have been coming to the exhibition. We had a really great opening last week with about 200 people there, so it's been really exciting to see how this exhibition has kind of taken on a life at Hampshire. As most of you know, no doubt know, and many of you have seen, I melted you in the gallery earlier. Pablo Delano's conceptual installation of the Museum of the Old Colony constructs an ironic museum using historical source material, represented in an enlarged and personally curated format to reflect on the relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and to consider the role of photography, archives, and museums in shaping social-political relationships and ways of seeing. I've had the opportunity to see and work with large numbers of students, staff, faculty, and community members who've engaged with this project in multiple ways and continue to do so as the semester unfolds. It's clearly become a space where important conversations are catalyzed. As a curator and educator, it's also exciting to be part of an exhibition or a project that continues to grow and change. So what you might not know is that the Museum of the Old Colony continues to acquire new materials and to work in new spaces, so the installation and the dialogue in the lists will take shape and new over time. Tonight, Pablo Delano will speak about the origin and evolution of the installation and give us some insights into new directions the museum is currently pursuing. A brief bio about Pablo. Pablo Delano was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He earned the BFA in painting from Temple University and MFA in painting from Yale. So the exhibitions of his work have been held in museums and galleries across the Americas, the Caribbean, and in Europe. He's the author of three books of photography, Faces of America, in Trinidad, and the forthcoming Heart of Good Scene, coming out next year I think with West End University Press. So Delano teaches studio art and photography at Trinity College, Hartford. We also serves as co-director of the Center for Caribbean Studies. So as you might have known, we will have some time for Q&A after Pablo's talk and we look forward to hearing from you then as well as more informally continuing those conversations over refreshments. And as I always say, please keep an eye on the gallery website and Facebook page for more information as we have a lot of upcoming programs around environmental injustice, things like decoding visual images through poetry. So there's really a rich range of programs associated with this exhibition that we encourage you to come to. So please do keep an eye on that. But most importantly, welcome Pablo. Thank you so much for being here and sharing with us tonight. Thank you very much. Buenas tardes. Gracias. So, anybody recognize this map? So that's this little island called Puerto Rico. It's where I was born. And where I grew up. And I have to say it was, in many ways, a wonderful childhood. I was a little bit bossy, maybe. And I grew up surrounded by spectacular things. All these pictures are things that were within my reach as a kid. And that those childhood experiences had a profound impact on me in many ways and created in me a deep love of this place where I was born and raised. Another factor was my parents who shared with me and who sort of opened the path for me to appreciate and come to love this island. There were many things and many memories that remained very powerful still to this day, the spectacular landscape in the countryside. And there were specific experiences of mine as a child that in a funny way stuck with me and became manifested in this project that I hope you've all seen over there in the gallery, the Museum of the Old Colony. One of those things was a visit as a young child to one of the very few museums that existed in Puerto Rico in those days, which was this museum in Muñozcira Park. Stuffy, smelly, basically a museum of natural history with all kinds of dead animals, glass cases and whatnot. That was my first exposure to a museum with bins behind glass and precious objects. Another thing that stuck in my psyche of besides the taste of those delicious canapas was the taste of the artificially-flavored drink, Old Colony. And if you stick around, you get to try it. In addition to a lot of these very positive and wonderful and rewarding experiences from my childhood, there were also troubling things that I experienced growing up. It was very safe. As a child, I roamed the streets of San Juan alone and witnessed very often a kind of condescending behavior of U.S. sailors who were stationed there. The island was very heavily militarized during the Cold War. There was army, navy, marines, and we would often encounter military convoys and basically sailors behaving badly. And I found that very, very kind of tough to take, even as a small child. Other things I remember being conscious of as a little boy was even as a small kid, and partly because of my parents' strong sense of social justice, obviously, income disparity. Very, very poor people who didn't have enough to eat, whereas in other quarters, people had more than enough and lived very lavish lives. In school, we learned about the Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, parked with the statue of Columbus still there. And we learned about the American arrival, which sometimes is called an invasion. If you look at the photograph on the left, which is a photograph that was just acquired in the last few days by the Museum of the Old Colony, you can see San Jose Church in Old San Juan, and you can see the bombardment, the damage caused by falling bombs as a result of the arrival of North Americans. So the U.S. invaded in 1898 and declared the stars and stripes to be Puerto Rico's flag. I decided to study art in the U.S., and I went off to the U.S. and took the degrees that Amy mentioned, and moved to New York City to be an artist. But those, that childhood experience was sort of stuck deep inside me, and I felt very attached and very connected to the island. And I got involved in various projects that kept me connected. For example, I worked with the art historian Deloro Bilal to illustrate some of his books on Puerto Rican folk art, and finally, this is a book on explotos, which are small metal objects that are used as a way of giving thanks to any particular saint that you've prayed to, to find them all through churches in the island and throughout Latin America. And that connection with the island has never left me. It has, and it's sort of played out in all kinds of different ways. So this is a book I did in the 70s. More recently, I've been photographing the city of Hartford, which has a very strong, very rich and large and important Puerto Rican population. This is the book that you mentioned forthcoming in Wesleyan University Press. It's called Hartford Scene, and obviously the Latino population in Hartford is very much a part of it. It's a book about the built environment, but the built environment reflects the people that live in. Throughout this time, I had the opportunity to take on many photo projects always with this in the back of my mind, and I'm gonna just run through a few of them so you get a sense of the background and the formation of how I eventually came up with this idea to do a project called the Museum of the Old Colony. One of those projects was to spend some time in Honduras with a good friend who was then working as the director of the Institute of Anthropology and History. He was in charge of all museums in the country and cultural policy, and we decided to try to do a book on the African heritage of people who live on the coast of, on the Atlantic coast of Honduras, a group called Garifuna, people who actually came to Honduras not from the African continent, but they had 200 years first in the Caribbean, the island of St. Vincent, it was very interesting and complex history. Unfortunately, that project never got finished because there was a small matter of a military coup in Honduras, and cultural policy changed about 180 degrees, whereas previously, the person I was working with was committed to democratizing culture. That's, let's just say that current administration finds that whole concept as a threat. Another project that really played heavily into my sense of what became the Museum of the Old Colony involved traveling to another Caribbean place, Trinidad and Tobago, and that resulted after 10 years in a book that examined post-colonial Trinidad and Tobago, particularly Trinidad, which was fascinating to me because it was a nation, right? It was a Caribbean country that had been a colony of Spain, it had been a colony of Great Britain, and in the early 60s became a republic, became a free country. So looking at that from the vantage point of what some considered to be the oldest colony in the world really was interesting. So I spent about 10 years traveling here, did a book, the book focused on the things that had been identified as tools for nation building, and one of those things was the arts, and another was the diversity of religious practice. So I spent a lot of time focusing on those things. Here's a baptism, shout out to Baptists, Baptism in the Sea at Dusk. This is previously the same baptism. There's a very large and important East Indian community there on my Puerto Rico because of the British colonial times when slavery ended, Indian indentured workers came, and so Indian culture is very much alive, and the national holiday, the great national holiday celebration of carnival in which the largest masquerade is called Sailor Mass, Sailor Mass Parade. And so that really struck a chord with me because of the pictures that you saw earlier, that whole experience of American sailors in the suits of someone as a child. Here are people appropriating that kind of power, that kind of dress, and making a spoof of it. Trinidad, unlike many Caribbean islands, chose to reject tourism largely, making the connection with tourism and European exploitation, the idea that these people came in ships and took the best things away. Meanwhile, as I grew up, as I grew older, through my teenage years and whatnot, Puerto Rico became highly industrialized as a way to create a middle class, so almost every US pharmaceutical company opened a factory there. They did that because of tax incentives. But unfortunately, that had some positive effects in that a lot of jobs were created, public health improved, literacy rate improved a lot, and there really was a foundation of a kind of middle class. The problem is that when those tax incentives went away in the late 90s and early part of the century, there was a collapse, an economic collapse. And this is a photo in the town of Fiorpierras where you can see basically it was a pedestrian mall, shopping mall, almost everything is shut. And this is repeated on almost every town in the island now. Ironically, one thing that was supposed to attract tourists was this giant sculpture of Christopher Columbus that was made by a Russian sculptor and was rejected by the city of Columbus, Ohio, and many other cities, and ended up, unfortunately, Hurricane Maria did not take this away. I don't understand how, because look how big it is, and look at all that surface work, right? In any case, all of this leads us to a kind of critical question in terms of looking at where things have gone. This is actually a bumper sticker of the stated party. It means where would we be without her? In other words, questioning where would liberty go be without the US? And that's kind of a pertinent question, I think especially now, when you consider some of the recent developments, for example, after the two hurricanes, the human Maria, President Trump arrived on the island and his response was to throw paper towels at people and say that this wasn't a real disaster, et cetera, et cetera. But those kinds of responses are not new. Look at the quote from a theater Roosevelt in 1906, which is reproduced up, I won't read it aloud, if you don't mind. It's ugly, you know? But we see this kind of motif being repeated over and over again, and you see it in the installation and the exhibit, if you've been to it. Another thing I became conscious of as I began my life in mainland United States and whatnot, was the history of othering or marginalizing people that were different. In other words, there were the colonial powers and then there were the people who had been colonized and the people who had been colonized or marginalized or occupied became curious objects of study. This is a photograph actually from the, not in some far off place, this is actually the American Museum of Natural History where children in New York City School, children were taken to see wax figures depicting so-called primitive people behind glass. But the so-called primitive people were not always behind glass. Sometimes they were actually live human beings. The Museum of Natural History also displayed people, intimate people that they brought. And the Bronx Zoo displayed this man here whose name was Otabenga in the cage. And there were actually zoos with human beings in them. This is a picture that I find sort of hard to look at because I was four years old when this picture was taken. So I was alive during this, this was 1958, I was born in 1954. And so I mean I'm almost the age of that child. So becoming aware of these things also reminded me that I had seen similar kinds of things a little bit here and there in history books that depicted the place where I was born in Puerto Rico. In particular, there was one large volume called Our Islands and Their People that my parents actually had. And what you see on the left is a photographer, one of the photographers of the U.S. authorities sent to take pictures in the island, and what you see on the right is one of the pictures he took. Here's another one, not by the same photographer, but you see the double image here. Double image is called a stereocard or a stereograph, and it was part of something like a view master. You put in a viewer and you give you a 3D image, but you can see the caption says a group of newly made Americans. So this idea that you just capture people and then you declared them to be Americans was quite prominent, and but it was an idea that needed to be sold to the public in the U.S. And so the U.S. sent a lot of photographers, a lot of writers, to produce what ended up being a ton of visual material to justify the colonial occupation of the island. And as things began to sort of become more and more prominent in my mind, especially with the creation of an oversight, a fiscal oversight board in the island a few years ago under Obama. This was a fiscal oversight board that was appointed to basically rule the island in the face of a huge debt, which sometimes referred to as an onerous debt because it was created under situations of exploitation and imperialism. Nevertheless, Obama appointed this fiscal oversight board which gave people appointed in Washington more power than any elected official on the island. So as a visual artist, how I felt I wanted to respond somehow and that's the origin of the project. That's how I began to think about what could I do? How could I deal with this? How could I make a presentation? How could I incorporate this into my art and feel that I'm working as a visual artist and expressing myself, but also bringing these concerns to the forefront? I began to think about these images that I had created in Trinidad and how in Trinidad there's this notion of play, very serious play and appropriated in a very serious way and having a great time and humor and irony, but also at the same time, these are costumes. Dressing up as fun, it's the woman on the left's having a great time, but at the same time, there's a deeper aspect to it which is about building a nation and confirming an identity. You look at these two pictures. One is the one on the right is taken in Trinidad and there are two men pretending or playing Sailors of Strait. That's the name of the mass grave. They're not sailors, they have regular jobs, could be an accountant, a shoemaker, whatever, but uncountable, they become these characters. The picture on the left is actually US sailor behaving badly coming out of a bar in Old San Juan. And so they look the same, right? I mean, this is sort of interesting kind of crossover. On top of all this, I remembered the sweet and sickening taste of old comedy. And somehow it all started to come together into a project and it occurred to me to make a museum like those racist museums that I had visited but a museum that would sort of shed light on the vision that imperial America had and tried to sell to the folks back home, right? And there was born the Museum of the Old Colony. It's a work of conceptual, performative art and it employs a methodology of appropriation. So basically I don't take any of these pictures. I take them, I steal them. I take them from other sources, I appropriate them. Now in my mind, and I'm sure this will happen like within the next two or three years, the Museum of the Old Colony will have a grand headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Anybody know why the flag is in black and white? Yes. Yes, it's a way, it's a form of protest and it's an acknowledgement of the oppression of anything that's valuable to us, right? So it's a form of protest. This is actually, there's another museum in this building now. Anybody know what it is? It's gonna be called the Metropolitan Museum of the Old Colony. Okay, so unfortunately we got off to much more humble beginnings in this space. This is actually a place called Alice Yard in Trinidad and Tobago and this was actually the first version of the Museum of the Old Colony. And it's grown and morphed and changed in many ways since then. The first, this first little exhibit was divided into three sections, three walls. One of them was called Native's Bering Bertons because for some reason many of these colonialist photographers like to show people carrying things on their heads. I was able to also incorporate video. You can see in the gallery, there's also a video piece. There are many video pieces. We just couldn't fit everything into the gallery. There was a good deal of interest in the installation. So it traveled, it began to travel. One of the places was to the 7th Argentine Biennial Documentary Photography in Tucumán, Argentina where it was a really nice museum, a very nice installation there. It's very interesting as the exhibit goes to different places, how different people respond. In Argentina, for example, people are not very aware of Puerto Rico or where it is or what not, that some people know it's part of the US or it's under the US flag, but Argentines are very familiar with military occupation. So for example, in that venue, I used a few images that would remind Argentines of that. This is another shop from Argentina. Then I was invited to do the installation at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center in New York University, which was an incredible, they had an atrium of space and hallways and spaces and classrooms, and I basically took over the whole space. You can see a few of the installation shops here. The installation changed. One of the things you can see in this picture, for example, is this long introductory paragraph when we brought it to Hampshire. We felt it would be more effective to break that long paragraph up into smaller text pieces, which you can see around the gallery, I'm sure you've seen it. But nevertheless, each venue is unique, and I respond to it. I try to respond to the particular context. For example, this is the King Juan Carlos I of Spain, and it's no secret that Spain was the first European power to colonize the island, and so there's the portrait of King Juan Carlos I, and he's in a room surrounded by images that, I'm fortunate I'm not the right picture, but that evoke the Spanish heritage, but you can see the arrow pointing right at him. Okay, then the next venue was the Museum of Contemporary Gardens, San Juan, which is fantastic to actually do it at home, and the responses were really, really fascinating. People were quite struck and moved by it, and I spoke into several friends of mine who were professors, and they took their classes to see it, and the one reaction that seems to be consistent across everyone who, all the groups that we'll see is indignation, and what they say, salieron indignados, in other words, they just made their blood boil. And to me, that's successful, that's good. That shows that the people are really looking at this and understanding what it is, right, which is the view from the outside, not the view that we've created of ourselves, but the view as we were seen by the colonizing powers. A lot of people going through there, thousands of people saw it there. They also have an educational program, so it was very rewarding to do the installation, and you can see how different the installation is, right? It's a different conception, because the space is different. So, in order to make this whole project more museum-like and more playful, like, what's wrong with me, right? You might be thinking, you know, how can this be playful? It's sick, right? Yes, but at the same time, what are the strategies that Caribbean people and enslaved people have used for centuries to cope, right? Think of Trinidad and think of the limbo dance. The limbo dance, we think of it as something that children do at a party, right? They do the limbo dance, like a birthday party. Actually, the limbo dance is far more meaningful than that. The limbo is a symbol for the middle passage. Like, you can get down and bend over backwards, but they won't break you, right? You come on the other side and you tramp in. So, play is really important, I think, in all our lives. And so, although the subject matter of this project is very deep and sometimes sickening and very difficult to work with, I mean, I sometimes find myself in tears and I can't, like, I gotta go home. I can't do it anymore in my studio. But at the same time then, it's actually something that makes me laugh. So, I decided that each picture in the Museum of the Old Colony should have a certificate of authenticity or stamp, right? So, I made my rubber stamp and all the prints you see in the gallery here have the official stamp. Another thing I do to point out that this is not fiction is, in every venue, there's a list of the sources, like where each of these pictures comes from. People say to me, oh, you made that up, right? You wrote those captions, are those your photoshopped? No, it's a creative and artistic project and the way it's put together, but the actual source materials are not modified. So, like every museum, every museum that practically, this is the world has, this country has a website and the website ends in .org and the Museum of the Old Colony is no exception. So, I invite you to visit the museumoftheoldcolony.org and see the pictures of the different venues and different sorts of things that are in the holdings of the Museum of the Old Colony. So, it's not just photographs. We also have objects. The collection has grown considerably even since we finished the installation here. You probably have seen the Patriot Economy Eraser. This is very useful. I decided that we would not display, would require, I think, some security to these conversations started. I want to just share with you now a couple of examples of images, pieces that are in the show itself and talk about the texts. So, some of you have seen this image and I hope you read the text because it's repulsive, right? I made it bigger in the next slide. The farming class is about unparred with the poor, darkies down south and varies much even in race and color, ranging from Spanish white trash to full-blooded Ethiopians. And this is the norm, right? Almost every image that was created by these North American photographers or the captions felt, for some reason, they're racialized. They feel compelled to comment on the color of people constantly. I think we're looking at the legacy of slavery and the legacy of the South. Many of the soldiers who came, by the way, came from the South because they're from the Southern U.S. who were part of the invasion forces, right? So, at the same time, any image, practically any image that depicts a person in this whole installation makes a reference to their color. At the same time, you can see the particular North American view of race, which is either your Spanish white trash or full-blooded Ethiopian. And then there's the range, right? So, it's a very, very North American attitude towards race. Another thing that I found really sort of difficult to contend with is the straight-up cruelty of some of the jokes that they made. For example, these two boys who are obviously very, very poor, have only rags to wear, and yet the person who wrote the caption for this image felt compelled to make fun of them and say that they're in their Sunday dress. All right, at the same time, not that long after the local government felt compelled to also send out images somehow, showing the success of the colonial experiment, or the colonial efforts. And they send out this image, and it's really quite striking when you compare this one to this one, and even more so when you read the caption that accompanied this image, which talks about Ki Keheros de Ki, four-year-old 50-pound Adonis, was chosen by tourists as the most perfect child. Now, I think I don't have to ask you to compare the physical characteristics of this chubby little boy, right, to these kids. He was chosen by tourists at the Kariba Hilton Hotel as the most perfect child, and he's wearing the latest. In other words, this hand-woven hibadohat, the paba, has been exoticized and made into a costume. It's quite horrific. So then there's the drink, Bizarre, probably brought by U.S. military in the 40s by the soldiers who wanted it on the basis. We don't really know how, I don't really know the history, and I've tried to look up the history, needs more research. One of the things I find compelling is the way that this drink has been sold as something that's ours as though we embrace, it's a metaphor, right, but it's as though we embrace this whole idea of the colony and a half for you a video of the commercial that was made to sell old colony in the island, and you can see that the video attempts to paint it as ours, as though the colony is us. We are the colony. The video highlights aspects of our culture and associates it with the idea of this drink. Let me see if I can get it to play now. So it's just one of those bizarre twists of irony that this soda somehow became identified with the island, right, and to this day. I mean, I bought this today, and this is, you notice that the label's in Spanish. It's not being sold here, but until recently, you could only get it here under this brand name because of something having to do with copyright infringement, but India was the brewery that bought the license to make it on the island. All right, the last time I spoke to a group from Hampshire was June 2nd, and it was when the exhibit had just started, and we just learned that according to Harvard, 4,645 people died in Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Inman. There was a response by a group of artists that called for people to bring pairs of shoes of people that they had lost, their family members that they had lost, to the Capitol building. I found out since then that one of the artists who organized this was Nelson Rivera who wrote the essay in the exhibition catalog for this show. It was a very, very powerful thing, and people just started arriving and bringing shoes and more shoes and more shoes and more shoes and more shoes, and people started leaving flags and messages, handwritten messages. It was a very, very tough, very sad, and eventually, after a certain period of time, the shoes were collected, and I wondered what could be done? This needs to go in some kind of memorial. What is gonna be done with these shoes? Well, on my last trip home, I found out what happened with the shoes. They're in bags, and they're in an abandoned house. They're just in plastic bags because there's no one else to put them. There's no official recognition of this. This was an art piece. It was a piece that many, many people came to visit and brought shoes, and all the shoes in this photograph, in the bags in this photograph, are shoes that have messages, and the downstairs of the house, there's shoes that are in black bags that don't have messages, right? So every pair of shoes, in these bags, in that little room, you see there is filled with bags like this, waiting for something to be done. We also learned that, according to George Washington University, there's a new estimate of how many people died, 2,975. The thing to remember is that these are guesses. They're estimates. There's no list of names, like we have from 9-11, you can get a list of names of the people. There's no list of names, and there never will be because people buried their relatives in the backyard when the funeral homes weren't functioning, and people, and it's very hard to know and to attribute the deaths. What are the deaths, like at what point do you, if somebody commits suicide a year later because they can't cope with the aftermath of the storm, does that get attributed to the, it's very hard to know. But the situation becomes very tough, right? And the day that that number was announced was very difficult for many of us, and also the day on which Trump basically said wasn't true, and he said that this number was invented to make him look bad. That was a very tough day. I know a lot of people that almost were on the margin of not being able to function because of that horrible insulting comment. Meanwhile, this all since June 2nd, right? Since the last time that I gave the similar talk here. Meanwhile, empty containers full of rotting food keep showing up. Relief supplies that were supposed to be issued to people in need are found in trucks, rotting, expiring. The picture on the bottom is a picture taken from an airplane showing one million bottles of water that were supposed to go to people who had no water. And for some reason they got deposited on this runway at a closed airport. And 36 minutes away in the town of Montcal, people were riding on the asphalt with chalk and spray paint help. We had no water, help. So the flying helicopters and planes could see that was 36 minutes away. There was one million bottles of water that never got to Macau, right? So that's the current context and that's partly what keeps the project going. I have a few more slides of just showing things that I've discovered and things that I will be incorporating in future venues that the project will is currently booked in a few more places. And I think it will continue to go on. I don't see myself losing interest in part because it's not the same thing over and over again. I keep changing it. So I find personally things that are challenging and things that interest me in new places and new directions to go with it. You notice that in the gallery, in the gallery show there were a couple of objects. There was the glass case with the actual bottles and cans of old colony. There was the economy eraser. The museum has acquired other objects for example, two books, which will be probably displayed side-by-side in a similar kind of glass case. One is from 1901, one is from 2007. And basically it's the same book with a pretty with a different covers. The book, the red book is a history of the United States colonies and the one on the right is called Puerto Rico. They all start out and established in 1898, right? So like before that, there was no island there and suddenly 1898, wow, there was an all-star island on the bottom, you can see it says in the United States of America. In fact, I've actually collected four or five of these so-called children's books that are currently available on Amazon. And if you look at them and read between the lines, you can see that all these children's books that are distributed in this country today and found in schools today, reading between the lines is all butchering the idea of the colony. Another direction the project is moving in is postcards. I've started to collect particularly postcards from the 50s and 60s and 70s, which depict this idyllic scenario, which is presumably the place that the tourists wants to go and escape from the everyday hassles of everyday life in North America. Pictures like this depicting God. I mean, this one is too unreal, I swear that the rainbow is actually in the postcard. So there's pictures of people on the beach and ridiculous poses and whatnot. Beyond that, I've also started working and conceiving of particular groupings of images that will be in the future. Like the groupings in this version here in Hampshire are quite large and thinking of smaller groupings that have images that really bounce and reflect off each other. Sometimes even two or three images. And so here's one. Anybody know who the woman on the left is? That's the right. And this was the cover of the Washington Post when she was released, because Jimmy Carter showed clemency and left her out of jail after 25 years. And I couldn't believe the wording, right? But it hadn't really struck me her face with the face of the Statue of Liberty from when a group of activists took over the Statue of Liberty and unfurled the flag. So this is one combination of images that I may include. I don't know because before the next one opens I may find something else, but another image that I discovered recently that's kind of blew my mind was an image from Life Magazine, which echoed a phrase used often in 1899, 1900, 1901, which is to always refer to Puerto Rico as a problem. The problem of Puerto Rico, what are we gonna do? So I find in 1943, a Life Magazine, and this is the opening photo on the opening page of the story, which refers to the island as an unsolvable problem. So there we are. The project moves ahead. Old Colony remains on the shelves. It's very sweet, I hope you'll taste some. And the project moves ahead.