NEW BRITAIN, CT.- The New Britain Museum of American Art announced a generous $420,000 grant recently awarded by the Mellon Foundation to support Puerto Rico in Focus, a multi-year initiative that explores the historical and contemporary intersections of Puerto Rican and U.S. art.

This initiative seeks to deepen public understanding of Puerto Rico’s historically complex relationship with the United States through exhibitions, scholarship, and community engagement. Funding will initially be directed toward the launch of the initiative’s inaugural exhibition, The Museum of the Old Colony: An Art Installation by Pablo Delano, which opened in March 2026. In addition, support will underwrite the production of bilingual scholarly catalogues for each of three exhibitions within the initiative and fund the establishment of an Advisory Council composed of leading voices in the fields of historical and contemporary Puerto Rican art and culture, ensuring that the project remains relevant to and rooted in community perspectives.

“We are immensely grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their support,” says Executive Director and CEO Brett Abbott. “This generous grant will allow the Museum to launch the multi-year Puerto Rico in Focus initiative, grow and strengthen community connections, and publish bilingual scholarly catalogues that will preserve these three important exhibitions for years to come.”

The Puerto Rico in Focus Initiative:

Located in the heart of Connecticut, the New Britain Museum of American Art serves a region that is home to one of the largest Puerto Rican communities in the mainland U.S. per capita. As a museum dedicated to the presentation of the art of this nation, the New Britain Museum of American Art is committed to an inclusive experience that extends beyond the stories told through the traditional canon of American art. In 2026, the Museum will launch a multi-year, multi-project initiative to coincide with the 250th celebration of our country’s founding, entitled Puerto Rico in Focus. The initiative will address the intersections, past and present, between the art of Puerto Rico and the U.S., in part by engaging contemporary Puerto Rican artists and exploring themes of diaspora, community, and national identity.

The Museum begins the multi-year series with the exhibition The Museum of the Old Colony: An Art Installation by Pablo Delano, running March 14 through July 5, 2026. Born in Puerto Rico in 1954, conceptual artist Pablo Delano’s project explores the complex intersections between Puerto Rico and the United States. Delano’s work focuses on the reappropriation of found objects, photographs, projections, and sound, which he recontextualizes to evoke new and often provocative meanings. The selected materials serve as testimony to the pervasive colonial influence of U.S. institutions and culture on nearly every facet of Puerto Rican life.

Following projects in the initiative series will consider adjacencies between historical American and historical Puerto Rican art (2027) and an exhibition featuring contemporary artists living and working in Puerto Rico (2028). Robust public programming and community engagement opportunities will take place throughout the run of the initiative, in addition to the assembly of an Advisory Council. The exhibition catalogue series will ensure a lasting legacy for these exhibition projects and the new scholarship that they contribute to the field.

In addition, the New Britain Museum of American Art is pursuing aligned strategic acquisitions to enrich presentations within the Museum’s permanent collection galleries. Along these lines, the New Britain Museum of American Art celebrates the addition of Rogelio Báez Vega’s The Country Club, 2024, and Antonio Martorell’s Los Estados Unidos de Puerto Rico/The United States of Puerto Rico, 2024, to the collection in 2025. These works will serve as pivotal anchors for the Puerto Rico in Focus initiative and forthcoming exhibitions in development. To launch work on the initiative, a cross departmental team traveled to Puerto Rico in March 2025 to meet with artists, colleagues, and scholars. The Museum is grateful for the support provided by CT Humanities for the planning stages of the initiative.