Pablo Delano’s photographs of ‘Caribbean Matters’
Visual artist and photographer Pablo Delano subverts longstanding stereotypes, questions historical narratives and celebrates the Caribbean’s global impact and resistance in “cuestiones caribeñas/caribbean matters: assemblage and sculpture by pablo delano.” The exhibition, on view August 11 through December 14 , 2025, at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, considers contemporary Caribbean reality through the juxtaposition of appropriated photographic images, archival documents and found objects.
“Play and improvisation are an important part of Caribbean life. Using humor to discuss difficult topics can be less threatening than something more confrontational,” Delano explained. “Sometimes you can get people to laugh and then prompt them to pause and wonder why they are laughing and even if they should be. Humor can be used to empower those who have had power stripped from them.”
Delano (b. 1954 San Juan, Puerto Rico), the Charles A. Dana professor of fine arts at Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut) and a co-founder of Trinity College’s Center for Caribbean Studies, conceptualizes “cuestiones caribeñas/caribbean matters” as a meditation on the Caribbean condition. The exhibition is informed by Delano’s childhood memories growing up in a tumultuous Cold War-era Puerto Rico; extensive travel and research in Trinidad and throughout the extended Caribbean; and his love of Caribbean literature, film and music.
The exhibited works reference a range of themes including migration, tourism, labor, gender, race and debt.
Colonialism and conquest shaped the Caribbean, creating ethnic diversity and social hierarchies. This historical impact is reflected in the archipelago’s distinct cultural and national identities but also in a common Caribbean ethos shared across the former and current Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Danish and U.S. territories. In his first solo exhibition since his participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Delano ponders these Caribbean commonalities, critiquing past and current systems of oppression but also building solidarity rooted in shared histories.
Through its three principal components, the installation “la (Re)conquista” portrays the persistent and interconnected legacy of colonialism. These elements allude to the original Spanish “conquest” and the later U.S. “re-conquest” of Puerto Rico in 1898. In a humorous echo of Marcel Duchamp’s “50 cc of Paris Air,” the installation’s central object spoofs the admiration some Puerto Ricans still direct toward Spain, their former colonizer.
Exhibition co-curators and UW–Madison faculty Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, associate professor of history, and Aurora Santiago Ortiz, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and Chicane/Latine studies, are confident “cuestiones caribeñas/caribbean matters” will spark dialogue across disciplines at UW–Madison, from art history and photography to anthropology and gender and women’s studies.
“During this time, it is especially important to center and bring forth the narratives and experiences of migrants and underscore the significance of understanding history and knowing why we are where we are today,” Santiago Ortiz said. “It is more important now than ever to recognize our past to critically think about our present and our future.”
Through humor and irony, Delano aims to reveal common threads between historical moments. His composition, “jet blue solution” draws a connection between two pivotal events: the 1873 abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico and the first large-scale airborne migration, which saw over 865,000 people leave the archipelago for the United States. This piece juxtaposes a historical image of a San Juan parade float with a contemporary model of a JetBlue airplane.
Manos a la Obra, or Operation Bootstrap, was an ambitious project that sought to industrialize Puerto Rico by attracting foreign investments. In his work of the same name, Delano incorporates objects that highlight the racialized and colonial dimensions of such initiatives. An integrated photograph from 1948 further underscores the often-overlooked labor involved in constructing this “modern Puerto Rico.”
“Caribbean history is global history. It is the place where the different empires merged, and it helped develop the global north,” Meléndez-Badillo said. “Having an exhibition that critically examines this without pushing a narrative allows people to create and develop their own interpretations of this fractured, complicated and complex past.”
Meléndez-Badillo and Santiago Ortiz have been following Delano’s work for several years, notably “The Museum of the Old Colony.” The art installation examines the United States’ enduring influence and oppression in Puerto Rico through the creation of a performative, fictional “museum” that includes reproductions of archival photos, original video works made from historic film footage as well as sculptural tableaus. Delano named the exhibition after Old Colony, a U.S.-brand soft drink popular in Puerto Rico since the 1950s. The sarcastic reference emphasizes Puerto Rico’s long and ongoing history of colonial rule — first under Spain and then under the United States. Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the 2024 Venice Biennale, saw an earlier version of “The Museum of the Old Colony” at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico in San Juan, resulting in the work’s inclusion in the Biennale, themed “Foreigners Everywhere.”
Delano learned photography from his father, renowned photographer Jack Delano. After attending Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and Yale University, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in painting, Delano returned to photography. He photographed New York’s Caribbean communities of the Lower East Side and Washington Heights. Starting in the late 1990s, he spent a decade photographing in Trinidad and Tobago. There, his fascination with that nation’s process of post-colonial nation-building led to the production of his acclaimed black and white photo book “In Trinidad” (2008). He has been working conceptually, constructing installations and assemblages with appropriated imagery and objects for the last 10 years.
About the Chazen Museum of Art
The Chazen Museum of Art makes its home between two lakes on the beautiful campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Within walking distance of the state capitol, it sits squarely in the heart of a vibrant college town. The Chazen’s expansive two-building site is 166,000 square feet. The collection of approximately 25,000 works of art covers diverse historical periods, cultures and geographic locations, from ancient Greece, Western Europe and the Soviet Empire to Moghul India, 18th-century Japan and modern Africa.
For more information: chazen.wisc.edu.
