The New Britain Museum of American Art presents the Distinguished Lecture “Exchanging Glances: Photography as a Decolonial Weapon”with Dr. Laura Bravo López, on Friday, March 13, 2026, at 5:30pm. Dr. Bravo’s presentation will center on “The Museum of the Old Colony: An Installation by Pablo Delano,” which will be on view from Saturday, March 14, 2026, until Sunday, July 05, 2026. The museum is located at 56 Lexington Street, New Britain, Connecticut. [Also see our previous post The Museum of the Old Colony-NBMAA.]
Description: Join Dr. Laura Bravo López in a conversation discussing her catalogue essay, written in connection to Pablo Delano’s special exhibition The Museum of the Old Colony. The lecture will be followed by a conversation between Dr. Bravo and artist Pablo Delano.
Dr. Bravo will delve into how Delano highlights how imperial visuality molded modern perceptions of Puerto Rico, revealing the ideological foundations of tourism, militarization, racialization, and political control. The lecture will also examine the historical framework of the photographs collected by Delano, reflecting on how the image of colonized territories and their populations was constructed according to imperial interests (as occurred in France or Great Britain) during the early decades of photography’s expansion in the late nineteenth century.
Dr. Laura Bravo López is Professor in the Art History Program at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. She is the former chair of the Art History Program, and she is also coordinator for faculty initiatives at iINAS, an undergraduate research program at the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, at the UPR. Dr. Bravo has a Ph.D. in Art History from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and has been a researcher at the Tate Britain, the MoMA in New York, and La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. She is the author of Certified Fictions: Invention and Appearance in Photography: 1975-2000, and coauthor of more than fifteen books on art history and visual culture. She is the founder of the online art journal Visión Doble, and she has curated more than twenty exhibitions and art projects in Puerto Rico and Spain, including Round Trip [Ida y Vuelta]: Migration Experiences in Puerto Rican Contemporary Art (Museum of History, Anthropology and Art, in the UPR, 2017-2018). In regard to migration and art, Bravo has been coeditor of Counterstreaming: Measuring the Impact of Cultural Remittances, a special issue of Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CUNY, 2016); and Geopolitics of Difference: Discussions on Gender and Migration in Contemporary Visual Culture, a special volume of Art and Politics of Identity (Universidad de Murcia, 2018).
Pablo Delano is a visual artist and photographer with a keen interest in archives and the lives, histories, and struggles of Latin American and Caribbean communities. The Museum of the Old Colony, an archival-based conceptual installation, examines the enduring colonial structures through the lens of Puerto Rico’s experience. The Caribbean island has lived through over five hundred years of colonial rule, beginning with Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1493 which led to Spanish dominion. Following the Spanish– American War in 1898, Puerto Rico became a US unincorporated territory, facing various adverse political and economic effects, including capitalist expropriation, racial hierarchy, and an idea of citizenship without the right to vote in US presidential elections. The installation’s title ironically references the complicity of museums and a US soft drink brand that is very popular in Puerto Rico, while highlighting how the power and presence of the US is grounded on colonial exploitation, social hygiene, and racial hierarchy in multiple ways, from the circulation of goods, peoples, and values to the recruitment of anthropologists, missionaries, photographers, and politicians in sustaining a colonial matrix. The Museum of the Old Colony includes myriad objects, photographs, newspapers, films, and magazines from various sources that tell multiple stories related to Spanish and US domination over indigenous and native communities as well as people of African descent, picturing an intricately woven tapestry of Puerto Rico’s troubled histories.
For more information, see https://nbmaa.org/exhibitions/the-museum-of-the-old-colony and https://secure.nbmaa.org/lectures-26/3-13-26
Also see our previous post https://repeatingislands.com/2025/12/23/forthcoming-exhibition-pablo-delanos-the-museum-of-the-old-colony-nbmaa/
The New Britain Museum of American Art presents the Distinguished Lecture “Exchanging Glances: Photography as a Decolonial Weapon”with Dr. Laura Bravo López, on Friday, March 13, 2026, at 5:30pm. Dr. Bravo’s presentation will center on “The Museum of the Old Colony: An Installation by Pablo Delano,” which will be on view from Saturday, March 14, 2026,
