NEW BRITAIN, CT.- The New Britain Museum of American Art announced a generous $200,000 grant recently awarded by the Henry Luce Foundation to support Puerto Rico in Focus: Historical Interventions, one of three projects planned as part of the New Britain Museum of American Art’s multi-year initiative that explores the historical and contemporary intersections of Puerto Rican and U.S. art.

The Puerto Rico in Focus initiative seeks to deepen public understanding of Puerto Rico’s historically complex relationship with the United States through exhibitions, scholarship, and community engagement. This relationship will be addressed through exhibitions of both Historical Interventions, which will pair historical Puerto Rican art with the Museum’s holdings, and Contemporary Views, which will feature contemporary Puerto Rican artists.

This grant from the Henry Luce Foundation will support the Historical Interventions installation planned for 2027/2028. The exhibition proposes a series of complex readings of the history of American art through dialogues and counterpoints with Puerto Rican art, spanning from the eighteenth century through the 1950s. Embedded throughout the New Britain Museum of American Art galleries, Puerto Rico’s historical artwork will create opportunities for learning, debate, and comparison.

The project will include bilingual labels for the exhibition, which will launch the development of bilingual labels Museum-wide, in addition to funding to support a research associate for the project. This grant will also partially underwrite the publication of a bilingual scholarly catalogue documenting the installation and investigating American and Puerto Rican artistic crosscurrents. The exhibition catalogue, which will be published by Hirmer Press, will contribute both to the Puerto Rico in Focus initiative series, as well as the Museum’s ambition to advance scholarship on its own permanent collection.

“We are extremely grateful to the Henry Luce Foundation for their support of this installation,” says Executive Director and CEO Brett Abbott. “This generous grant will allow the Museum to bring Puerto Rican art into conversation with our historic permanent collection and expand accessibility through the translation of bilingual exhibition labels.”

Puerto Rico in Focus: Historical Interventions:

Opening in fall 2027, Historical Interventions will be collaboratively curated by Dr. Mercedes Trelles, Interim Director and Professor in the art history program at the University of Puerto Rico, and Dr. Stephanie Mayer Heydt, Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the New Britain Museum of American Art. The exhibition will place Puerto Rican art and the Museum’s core historical collection in dialogue, highlighting resonances as well as distinctions. Presented throughout the Museum and within focused exhibition spaces, these encounters will raise questions about nationality, identity, commonality, and differences.

“Historical Interventions offers an important opportunity to bring historical Puerto Rican art into dialogue with the Museum’s collection of American art in ways that are both illuminating and thought-provoking,” says Heydt. “I am especially pleased to be working on this project with my esteemed colleague Dr. Mercedes Trelles, whose knowledge and collaboration have been invaluable throughout the process. We hope the exhibition will introduce new audiences to the richness, complexity, and significance of Puerto Rico’s artistic traditions and history.”

Historical Interventions provides a focused opportunity to reconsider the Museum’s canonical American art collection within the expanded context of the art and culture of Puerto Rico. Colonial-era American works will be shown alongside paintings by the 18th C Puerto Rican master, José Campeche y Jordán; themes of nature, landscape, and nationhood will be explored through Hudson River School landscapes and paintings by Francisco Oller and José López de Victoria; transatlantic artistic exchange will be examined through John Singer Sargent, Oller, and José Cuchí y Arnau; and genre compositions by Ramón Frade and Winslow Homer will be placed in dialogue.