Miami Art Museum Receives Major Donation

When the Miami Art Museum reopens as the Pérez Art Museum Miami in December, it will do so with at least 300 additions to its collection. The museum became a collecting institution in 1996 and has since focused on international contemporary art with a spotlight on the Americas. The Scholls have been building their collection for more than three decades; it spans works from the past 50 years, with an emphasis on work created since 1990.

Local collectors Dennis and Debra Scholl have donated works Matthew Barney and Lorna Simpson, among others, to the museum in the past, and maintain an exhibition space, World Class Boxing, in the Wynwood Art District, where they've shown many of their large-scale installations and videos.

The donation is a major boon for the museum, whose permanent collection previously numbered 1,000 artworks. The Scholls' gift includes work by Simon Starling, Olafur Eliasson, Catherine Opie, Zoe Strauss and Walead Beshty.

Dennis Scholl is a vice president at the Knight Foundation (a Miami nonprofit that supports innovations in journalism, media and the arts) and Debra Scholl is the chairwoman of Locust Projects, an alternative space in Miami's Design District.