By Laura Bruney and Etain Connor, Arts & Business Council of Miami

A true renaissance man, Dennis Scholl is a philanthropist, art collector, and entrepreneur, four-time Emmy winner for his work in cultural documentaries, CPA and lawyer. His out of the box thinking has captured the imagination and interest of business leaders, artists and creative industry executives interested in featuring the arts as a conduit for change. Mr. Scholl, Vice President of Arts for Knight Foundation, is a nationally-renowned cultural change-maker creating new opportunities to reimagine community engagement in the arts. Overlooking Miami’s magnificent Biscayne Bay, we sat down for a thought provoking conversation with this amazing trendsetter.

Dennis Scholl, Knight Foundation VP/Arts

ABC: What do you think makes a vibrant community and what role do the arts play? DS: When I came to Knight Foundation six years ago, I asked myself that very question. I was coming to the foundation from the perspective of the consumer and didn’t have the knowledge to answer it well. In 2010 we conducted the Soul of the Community, a survey to find out what makes us love where we live.  To our surprise, overwhelmingly, the first choice was social offerings with arts and culture as the dominant choice. There is now empirical evidence that people value the arts. It makes them more participatory in their communities.

When reviewing the results of the survey, we thought that jobs would be the main factor that drives people to select and live in a community. It turns out that Millennials go where they want to be first and then they look for a job. To lure and keep young professionals, the onus is on community builders, elected officials and change-makers to develop a city that is vibrant, diverse and full of cultural offerings. Interesting places attract and keep talent and the arts attach people to their community. We can use the arts as a tool to reverse brain drain and keep our talented young people here.

ABC: When Knight designed the Arts Challenge, a matching component was included. Why? DS:The Knight Arts Challenge has only three rules. The idea has to be about the arts, it has to take place in South Florida and the grant must be matched 100%. We wanted to discover emerging artists and small cultural groups. We inspired grassroots groups that foundations have traditionally not funded to submit their ideas with our very easy application process. The winners had the experience of applying, having their idea vetted and being endorsed. We developed the challenge to ensure that our community has some skin in the game.The matching money can come from individuals, corporations or from other philanthropic sources and the matching component has opened doors. The process is more outward looking and focused.  After the grant support ends, the group has developed fundraising skills and learned confidence they can use as the move forward. The match gives arts groups, especially emerging groups and artists, the clout to open corporate doors.

ABC: I loved Random Acts of Culture because it was a great way to engage casual users and non-users of the arts. What can we do to reach and engage new audiences? DS:There is a subset of our population that cares deeply about the arts in our community. Knight Foundation is interested in learning more about how to reach those that are completely unengaged. A live performance is vibrant and the experience becomes hard wired into us. As we become more digitally engaged we have moved away from regular opportunities to participate in live performance. With Random Acts of Culture, we are trying to remind people that the arts are magical.

Knight Foundation has done 1,268 Random Acts of Culture and the results have been miraculous. Literally tens of millions of people become engaged with the performances with views online via sites like YouTube and platforms like Vimeo. Think about it, those are Lady Gaga numbers! Through Random Acts, Knight Foundation reminds people that they care about things like classical music and the classical arts. Random Acts also gets the performers out of the concert hall and into the streets.

You hope that when you create something new you plant a seed that catches on and other organizations take it and run with it. To our delight, that has happened with Random Acts of Culture.  We love that we have inspired artists and arts groups to do their own pop up performances in nontraditional spaces and venues. They see the value of connecting with the casual audience. Classical singers are featured at sporting events and dancers can be seen at the farmer’s market and the airport! It’s all about being accessible and reaching that untapped audience and all of these random acts are tapping into that audience.

ABC: What role does the corporate community play? DS:Miami is a young community. We are only 115 years old, that’s 250 years younger than Philadelphia, for example. It already has two plus centuries more of experience building and supporting the arts. Miami has a young business community without many legacy corporations. We are an entrepreneurial  community that was built by immigrants and our small business community does not have the history of giving to the arts.That being said, you can see we are maturing. More corporations are stepping up and giving.  As startups grow into successful businesses, we see them thinking about how they should share their success by supporting and strengthening the community. Through our challenge grants, we have brought new corporate support to the arts. They know these arts projects have been vetted and have shown they are something the community is interested in. Corporations love a challenge and they love the contest aspect. They like their community investment doubled.

ABC: How do you see technology impacting the arts? DS: One of the things about the arts in Miami that I lie awake at night and worry about is the digital revolution. At Knight Foundation, we focus a fair amount of our resources on the digital divide. We understand that the arts consumer moves at light speed when it comes to technology, while many arts groups are still working at a snail’s pace and have not kept pace with their constituency.

Studies have shown that over 90% of the content we look at in the next 5 years will be online and much of that will be in form of video. 90%! That is an impressive and intimidating percentage. Knight Foundation has invested a lot of time and energy working with the arts in moving forward digitally. Nothing threatens the relationship between an arts organization and their audience more than the group not being progressive when it comes to technology. When putting together budgets and goals, many arts groups put digital tools at the bottom of their priority list year after year. While there are costs associated with becoming a digitally savvy organization, the actual cost of doing nothing is far greater.

Here is where the arts have an advantage, a digital relationship should and could be an arts organization’s most valuable asset. The arts have a natural advantage when it comes to video and dynamic visuals. Arts organizations can showcase performance highlights and take participants back stage, and show them the process of creating art in compelling ways. Technology gets arts events and programs on the radar of young audiences and out of town visitors and can lead to great virtual outreach. Think about it – your audience does your marketing for you by sharing with their friends online. We need to teach the smaller and emerging groups how to engage  with their audience so there is an understanding that technology doesn’t just bring audiences to a museum, exhibition or performance, it engages them.

ABC: Wearing your hat as an arts collector, how have the visual arts changed over the years in Miami? DS:My wife and I have been collecting for 37 years. We love collecting, but a few years ago we got a little tired of the cult of personality that contemporary art has become. While in Australia visiting our wine company, I was invited to an aboriginal art museum in New South Wales. The experience was an epiphany for me.

Aborigines have been creating art for over 40,000 years and it is an integral part of their lives. Art is a form of communication for them, it tells their story and passes down their legacy. The most fascinating thing to me is this is a culture with a long history of creating art, yet it feels so contemporary.

I was hooked and my enthusiasm very quickly encouraged Debra to pursue this passion with me.For the last five years, we have collected aboriginal abstract paintings and now own about 300 pieces.  We are currently finalizing a major American touring exhibition, No Boundaries: Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Abstract Painting, which focuses on nine Australian Indigenous artists in our collection. The show will open in early 2015 at the Nevada Art Museumfollowed by venues at the Portland ICA, the Charles Wright Museum in Detroit, and then the Perez Art Museum Miami.

This is a new passion for us and we want to share it with the world and bring it the attention it deserves. My background and interest in film lead us to take a film crew to the central desert where we filmed the artists creating their work. We hope the documentary inspires others in their own creativity. It should be an integral part of everyone’s life – that’s something we don’t recognize in the United States. It’s not just about consuming art, it’s also about doing it.  We need to foster more of that.

ABC: As an arts visionary, what do you think about the arts in Miami? DS:Miami’s arts community has grown so significantly that we have had our 15 minutes of fame for over a decade now. Our ballet company has a world-wide reputation for stellar performances. We have one of the great new museums in the world. YoungArts is doing something that no one else is doing to motivate and identify tomorrow’s artists. There has never been a better time to care about culture, to be involved, to participate and to embrace the arts in Miami.

In Miami, we are generating culture in quantity and in quality. Our cultural community has a unique place in the world and has grabbed the attention of arts aficionados everywhere.  All these signs point to this being a quintessential moment for Miami’s emergence as a cultural destination. It’s not forward looking. It is happening now. I can’t imagine a more exciting time to be here.

ABC: How do you see Knight Foundation participating in the ever-growing arts scene? DS: The Knight Arts Challenge and our other grant programs give us an idea of what is bubbling up in the streets. Instead of Knight Foundation sitting in a room deciding who to fund, we are hearing directly from the local community about what is interesting to them. That makes the grant making process that much more exciting and effective.

I have read every single idea that has been pitched in the Knight Arts Challenge, that’s over 15,000 ideas. It is astonishing the innovative and interesting work being done not just in Miami, but in all the Knight communities. The Knight Arts Challenge provides the fuel to empower the organic momentum for creativity in the arts.

About the Arts Biz Dialogue The Arts & Business Council of Miami has developed a new blog to focus on corporate leaders that support the arts. The interactive exchange of ideas will provide us with insight on successful corporate partnerships. Each conversation will be featured in the blog salon on our website. Stay tuned for more interesting interviews and get the inside scoop on why some of South Florida’s top corporate leaders collaborate with the arts.