Heliconia Projects is a nomadic gallery and curatorial platform founded by Nicole Bainov and Elsa Maldonado, two Dominican Republic based collectors driven by their deep love for art and commitment to nurturing connections and comunity through culture. In this interview Nicole and Elsa open their doors to their lives and their gallery, showing us their remarkable to the art scene emerging from this vibrant region.
Q: Tell us about yourselves and how you decided to start Heliconia Projects.
Elsa: Nicole and I met here, in the Dominican Republic. I used to live in the United States and Nicole in London, but it has already been three years since both of us live here. How we met was one of those coincidences that are not coincidences in life. Nicole went to visit a house and the owner of the place was my uncle. He asked Nicole what her name was, and when Nicole told him, my uncle replied: "I know a man with that last name, he was my partner".
Nicole: Well, that partner was my father.
Elsa: Then my uncle tells me: "You have to meet Nicole. She is also fascinated by art and her family is very nice." We arranged to meet and coincidentally, her wedding was in three days. I was her wedding crasher. We are both collectors, so we started sending each other artists we were interested in and loved their practice. From there, we shared it with people we knew, and a very organic art advisory started to emerge. So, we said, "What if we try doing an event or an exhibition?" But we realized we wanted to do more than that.
Nicole: (laughs) I said, "Come to my wedding." When we met, we saw that we had a good synergy between the two of us. We have different tastes in many areas, but similar in art. We were also both very interested in supporting artists and thought about what we can do together with our collective experiences in the art world. We wanted to do something that we could do in different parts of the world, and at the same time take advantage and bring the international art world to the Dominican Republic and bring Dominican artists abroad. We wanted something different, fun, dynamic, breaking the mold of a traditional art gallery. This is how Heliconia Projects was born, an itinerant gallery and curatorial platform.