The first months of Dennis Scholl’s new job, as president and CEO of Oolite Arts, have been anything but boring. He began the new position in early September, as Hurricane Irma picked up speed in the Caribbean. “I put up hurricane shutters the first week, pulled hurricane shutters down the second week and the third week I got a budget approved,” he quips.
Multi-tasking comes naturally to the quick-thinking entrepreneur, patron and collector, who previously served as a board member of local and national arts institutions, as well as the vice-president of arts at the John S. and James L. and Knight Foundation. At the Knight Foundation, Scholl disbursed over $200 million to artists around the country. This experience made him the ideal candidate to lead ArtCenter, a visual arts nonprofit that sold one of its landmark properties on South Beach’s Lincoln Road for $88 million in 2014. Today, ArtCenter has the largest cultural endowment of any cultural organization in South Florida.
