DEBRA AND Dennis Scholl open their contemporary art collection to the public.

Dennis and Debra, who work together as real estate investors, are motivated by a desire to share their collection with other art lovers, but a place on the Miami art circuit is also a de rigueur strategy for the city’s serious collectors looking to distinguish themselves from mere investors. "If dealers are trying to decide who gets a work of art, [visibility] matters to them," Dennis says. "We treat that very, very carefully. We work hard to make sure that artists, dealers and other collectors know that we acquire work to have it, not to flip it."

The couple began collecting in 1978. They have always looked for artists at the beginning of their career, partly for economic reasons. "If I wanted to collect Old Masters, I’d be able to buy 1/20th of the selection that I buy," Dennis says. Having started when there was a relatively small cadre of contemporary art collectors, he has seen interest escalate, with "a large component of that group doing it on a purely speculative basis."

This is a trend he abhors. "It’s bad for the market, bad for artists, bad for dealers, it’s bad for everybody. We’ve seen this before. It happened in the late 1980s, with Donald Sultan, Eric Fischl, Robert Longo. Then suddenly in ’91, there was no more art market, literally overnight; 150 galleries closed in SoHo."

For the Scholls, the crash presented an opportunity to build a photography collection. They paid less than $1,000 for Anna Gaskell’s Untitled #1 from her Wonder series; Gaskell’s work now sells in the $20,000 range at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York and has commanded more than $30,000 at auction. They bought Richard Prince’s Untitled (Four Women With Hats) for less than $20,000. Prince’s 2003 Mountain Nurse sold last November at Sotheby’s for $744,000; his work has soared as high as $1.2 million at auction.

Dennis and Debra have no penchant for auction frenzies. They buy strictly on the primary market, relying on their solid relationships with gallery owners. The couple have focused on the work of emerging artists recently. They paid in the $10,000 to $15,000 range for works from the first gallery show of Tamy Ben-Tor, a young filmmaker and video artist; for works by Zach Feuer in New York; and works by Francesca DiMattio, a recent Columbia MFA graduate, directly from the artist’s studio, a technique the Scholls have not often used in the past.

Auction houses often approach the Scholls about consigning their work, but almost invariably they resist. "Selling is not part of what we do on a regular basis," Dennis says, "although I won’t say we never sell anything." Their preferred method of deaccession, which they do to make room for new works, is to give museums 10 to 20 pieces a year, or roughly 5 percent of their collection. The hard part of donating works that they buy for love instead of profit potential, he notes, is "picking who gets what."

Photograph by Riccardo Savi.

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