A Catalan emigrant who would build a career in business found another way to connect with the country, through its artists
SANTO DOMINGO – A building dedicated to automobiles holds an important part of the Dominican visual memory, as it is reached without leaving behind the bustle of John F. Kennedy Avenue. Upon ascending to the fifth floor of the Honda Building, everything changes.
It is a universe of lines, colors, dreams and magic; a unique point where Celeste Woss y Gil, Jaime Colson, Yoryi Morel, Darío Suro, Clara Ledesma, Paul Giudicelli, Ramón Oviedo and some contemporaries coexist.
The museum opened its doors on February 18, 1999, although its history began almost four decades earlier, in 1961, when Juan José Bellapart and his wife, Milagros Álvarez de Bellapart, began to collect works of art, without knowing that they were founding a museum.
It was a family collection that grew over the years, eventually becoming one of the most important private collections of Dominican art and, finally, an institution open to the public.
Born in Barcelona, Bellapart was 16 years old when he traveled to America with some neighbors. After passing through New York, he arrived in the Dominican Republic, where he began working at the La Sirena fabric store. In 1959, he opened his first business on Duarte Avenue and later became involved in the Honda motorcycle trade.
Bellapart cultivated friendships and one of the most significant relationships was the one he established with the painter Jaime Colson, from whom he acquired a Still Life in the seventies, painted in 1943, on the recommendation of the artist.
There began a collection that would eventually gather more than 400 works by the Creole painter, becoming one of the largest collections of his production, and which on February 18, 1999, ceased to be just a family heritage.
Opening
The Bellapart Museum opened its doors with the intention of preserving, studying and disseminating Dominican art, with free admission, and began to receive visitors, students, researchers and art enthusiasts.
Its permanent collection offers a journey through Dominican artistic production from the late 19th century to the 20th century, through painting, drawing, engraving and sculpture, arranged so that the narrative is not limited to a succession of styles and names, but rather the works are related to events and transformations of Dominican society, linked to the international processes that influenced the creation of its artists.
A varied menu
The tour includes, among others, Luis Desangles, Abelardo Rodríguez Urdaneta, Josep Gausachs, Antonio Prats-Ventós, Gilberto Hernández Ortega, Ada Balcácer, Silvano Lora, Domingo Liz, Soucy de Pellerano, Cándido Bidó and Inés Tolentino.
In addition to the permanent galleries, the museum offers temporary exhibitions, Saturday gatherings, guided tours, children's workshops, educational programs, and publications. In 2022, the museum established the Juan José Bellapart Art Prize, a biennial award designed to recognize contemporary art and add new works to the collection.
New address
After the death of Juan José Bellapart on March 10, 2020, the project continued under the direction of Mari Pili and Maribel Bellapart. In 2012, art historian, artist, educator, museographer, curator, and cultural manager Myrna Guerrero Villalona assumed the directorship, expanding its programming and its relationship with contemporary art, artists, and the public.
In the summer of 2026, Bellapart hosted the exhibition “The Prado at the center: photography and memory”, a PhotoImagen exhibition that brought together Spanish and Dominican photographers based on the collections and spaces of the National Prado Museum.
The museum operates on the fifth floor of the building where he was born: Monday to Friday, from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and on Saturdays, from 9:00 a.m. to noon.
On an avenue where thousands of vehicles pass, a story continues that began in 1961 with a private collection and ended up becoming a place to look at, admire, study and preserve Dominican art.
