Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/566702
T hree years ago, Dennis Scholl and his wife Debra—known in Miami for their unrelenting cultural support—began collecting Aboriginal art. In 2002, Scholl along with sommelier Richard Betts, bought a vineyard in the Barossa Valley in Australia, producing wine under the label of Betts & Scholl. During one of his many jaunts to Sydney, Scholl explored the local museum and gallery scene. "I felt like I had been struck by lightning. It was one of those moments where it seemed so fresh, so spiritual and so exciting," says Scholl about visiting the Art Gallery of New South Wales. "I flew home, walked into my house and said to Debra, 'You're not going to believe what we're going to do next! We're going to start a great collection of contemporary Aboriginal art!'" The couple met in law school, and over the last 38 years have amassed a substantial art collection that began with Robert Motherwell's print, Brushstroke, and has expanded to 1,200 works, with 300 works donated to the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) in 2013. Each December, the Scholls invite a curator into their home during Art Basel Miami Beach, and this year Franklin Sirmans, the Terri and Michael Smooke Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), has been chosen to re-hang the collection in the Scholl home. "One of the wonderful things about this collection is its approachability," says Scholl in regards to the 75 Aboriginal paintings which are on loan to "No Boundaries," a traveling exhibition opening at PAMM this month. "The nine male artists in the show are revered cultural and ceremonial leaders in their community who began to paint in order to bring their culture to a wider world," explains Scholl. The artists are members of the Papunya Tula Artists cooperative, who started painting late in life. Work by Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, the only living artist in the exhibition, caught Scholl's attention in Australia, then later when his painting, Wilkinkarra, was on view at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany. "I had bought a number of things, but that work was the go-big moment," says Scholl about Tjapaltjarri's circle-and-line painting technique depicting Tingari, a cycle in Aboriginal mythology that embodies dreams. "It comes with a deep and complex cosmology. The more time I spend learning about it, the less I understand—it's that deep," Scholl says about the paintings that have become an integral part of his spiritual life. 106 CULTURED IMAGE COURTESY OF THE PADDY BEDFORD ESTATE; WILLIAM MORA GALLERIES, MELBOURNE AND THE PÉREZ ART MUSEUM MIAMI WALKABOUT A new exhibition of Aboriginal art, drawn from the collection of and , makes its museum debut at PAMM. BY MELISSA FELDMAN Paddy Bedford's Untitled on view at PAMM's "No Boundaries" exhibition