People Of The Gallery

Craig Robins, CEO and president of Dacra, a South Florida real estate development company. He has built a widely admired contemporary collection.

Craig Robins, CEO and president of Dacra, a South Florida real estate development company. He has built a widely admired contemporary collection.

by Michael Kaminer
Special To The Jewish Week

The Jewish snowbirds from the Northeast and Midwest still make the winter pilgrimage, the traditional December passage to Miami Beach. But they’re now joined by thousands of artists, curators, collectors, social climbers and hangers-on from around the world who descend on South Florida for Art Basel Miami Beach, which deems itself “the most important art show in the United States.”

This year’s show — along with countless parties, afterparties, satellite exhibits, and performances — took place earlier this month in the Art Deco district, just above South Beach. And among those attending with pride, as Miami swells with global art-world players, were Jewish collectors who helped put the city on the map as a serious art capital.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago,

long before Basel, there was a small group in Miami whose collections were better than the museums,” recalls Debra Scholl — nee Debra Sue Schwartz of Paterson, N.J. — a respected collector who, with her husband, property investor Dennis Scholl, owns the edgy Miami gallery World Class Boxing. “Most of us were Jewish, and most of us happened to own a lot of real estate. It was a tight little community.”

Since Miami had just a few major spaces to exhibit art, according to Scholl, collectors took matters into their own hands. “The Museum of Contemporary Art opened in North Miami only because it got funding there. The Miami Art Museum opened downtown in a really bad Philip Johnson building. So a bunch of us decided to open our own galleries in very different places,” says Scholl, whose collection of more than 600 works includes art-world stars such as Cindy Sherman, Oliafur Eliasson and Thomas DeMann.

The muscle of those collectors — and their canny support of emerging artists from around the world — helped play a role in attracting Art Basel to Miami Beach, Scholl says.

While Miami’s cozy circle of collectors has loosened in the seven years since Art Basel’s debut, its core of Jewish art patrons has become even more influential in the city’s cultural and civic life. Along with the Scholls’ 4,000-square-foot gallery, which displays oversized works from their enormous contemporary collection, the city’s Wynwood gallery district includes emerging, but already renowned art spaces like The Rubell Collection, MoCA at Goldman Warehouse, and the Margulies Collection at the WAREHOUSE.
Wynwood itself has been transformed — like Manhattan’s Soho in the 1980s — from a gritty light-manufacturing neighborhood just north of downtown into a white-hot quarter of exhibition spaces and studios. “Because it’s the only place in Miami that has an urban smell to it, I saw the opportunity to create a central art district there,” says Tony Goldman, the real-estate mogul and art collector whose donation of a building in 2005 let the North Miami-based Museum of Contemporary Art plant a flag in Wynwood — and helped accelerate the area’s transformation.

“I knew MoCA’s chief executive, and saw the wonderful things they were doing. I also knew they needed to expand,” says Goldman, who was also an architect of Soho’s renaissance three decades ago. “In the meantime, I had converted this dead warehouse into an exhibition gallery where I displayed my own collection. I convinced MoCA and its board that this was a great opportunity to grow.

“Remember when MoMA [the Museum of Modern Art in New York] went to Long Island City while its buildings were being redone? It put new energy into the institution’s mission.”

MoCA at Goldman Warehouse boasts 12,000 square feet of gallery space and 4,000 square feet of art storage; Goldman has allowed the museum rent-free use of warehouse for five years. “MoCA brought a wonderful sense of stability and taste to the neighborhood,” he says.

For Goldman, who estimates he owns “23 or 24” buildings in Wynwood with his son Joey, Wynwood’s makeover obviously offers a financial upside. But Goldman — himself the son of renowned collectors Charles and Tilly Goldman, who displayed Monets, Dufys, and Corots at home — also claims a particularly Jewish civic mission in his quest to promote publicly accessible art.

“Without art, there’s no community,” he says. “It’s part of the fullness of life that Jews have always sought. We’re not bland people. We want that kind of joy, that kind of history, emotion, and texture in our lives. I feel a responsibility to share that.”
Goldman’s personal collection, amassed over 25 years with his wife Janet, ranges from Alfred Eisenstat photos to Jules Olitski paintings to Hans van de Bovenkamp sculptures. “One thing my mother impressed upon me was an eclectic sense of art,” Goldman says. “But my wife and I have a lot in storage. You only have so many walls.”
Fellow real-estate developer Craig Robins never runs out of places to display his star-studded contemporary collection; he rotates pieces between individual offices and a large main gallery at the headquarters of Dacra, his South Florida real-estate development company.

“I’m very blessed in that my business is a civic mission,” says Robins, whose ventures helped revive a moribund South Beach two decades ago and created Miami’s Design District in the ’90s. Dacra’s mission statement, in fact, promotes “integrating design, architecture, and public art” into its building projects.
Since buying his first piece of art — a “modest sketch” by Dali — while studying in Barcelona, Robins has built a widely admired contemporary collection encompassing art-world stars John Baldessari and Marlene Dumas and design icons Zaha Hadid and Marc Newsom. Until October, Robins also ran The Moore Space, an acclaimed Wynwood gallery that showcased Miami artists, and offered a sought-after arts residency program.

“The conventional wisdom in my industry was to tear things down and build unattractive structures in their place,” he says. “A contrarian viewpoint, a way of coming up with different solutions, has served me well, and that kind of thinking is what art is all about.”

Likewise, “one of the things we’re taught in Judaism is to think abstractly,” Robins says. “Abstract thinking connects to innovation. When you think about something outside the basic channels of thought, you see more and find other paths. There’s so much about Jewish study and training related to that. It is a great dimension of our spirituality.”

Debra Scholl agrees. “Growing up, my parents instilled an appreciation of art in in me — any type of art,” Scholl says. “A well-rounded education seems to be much more of a Jewish tradition. My husband, who is not Jewish, didn’t grow up that way. Sports was important to him, not a cultural background. To my parents, culture was extremely important. Maybe that’s why a lot more Jewish people seem to become art collectors.”

That role doesn’t translate into cheerleading for Jewish artists, though. “We basically choose artists by what we see visually and whether it compels us,” says Scholl, who estimates that she and her husband have amassed more than 600 works. “An artist’s background doesn’t matter to us. But artists bring their history with them. We do have a lot of Jewish artists like Tamy Ben-Tor, an Israeli based in New York whose work is about being Jewish and identity. It’s very true to her ethnic origin, and very clever in how she portrays it.”
In the meantime, Scholl is spending every spare minute preparing for Art Basel, a sort of Olympics for collectors. “It’s quite hectic for us,” she says. “There are 20 other fairs around that surround Basel, and Dennis and I try to go to all of them.”

For anyone trying to follow in her footsteps — literally — Scholl advises a slow and steady approach. “It takes a lot of patience and good walking shoes,” she says. “Try not to go for opening night, but the day after. The crowds are much smaller, and you can actually see the art. Pick and choose, take your time and enjoy — you can’t do everything.”