Alumni Spotlight: Olivia Smith

Olivia Smith (B.F.A. ’11) is this week’s featured alum in our new Alumni Spotlight series for the This Week at Meadows e-newsletter. Each week, a different Meadows alum will be highlighted for their accomplishments post-graduation.

Students in Meadows’ Division of Art are encouraged to experiment, collaborate and explore where their creative interests might lead. For Olivia Smith, that support became the foundation for a career in the contemporary art world. Today, Smith is the co-founder and partner at Magenta Plains, a New York City gallery representing 20 artists and placing their work with leading museums and collectors around the world.

As an art student at Meadows, Smith embraced nearly every opportunity to create and collaborate. Encouraged by her professors, she staged pop-up installations around campus, worked with dance and music students, built ceramic drums for the World Music Ensemble, and would spend long nights developing projects in her studio.

“My art professors at Meadows were working artists mounting gallery exhibitions, giving artist talks, and investigating their ideas and materials in the studio,” says Smith. “They promoted a culture of experimentation, poetic inquiry, delight in mystery, and associative thinking that catapulted my self-confidence as an artist.”

This artistic spirit took her from West Dallas to Bali to France and even to neighboring New Mexico. At SMU-in-Taos, a satellite campus that specializes in cultivating educational opportunities enhanced by the resources of Northern New Mexico, Smith created large-scale installations from natural and found materials in the landscape.

During her time at Meadows, she also participated in the New York Colloquium led by Professor Philip van Keuren, where students spent winter breaks immersed in New York’s galleries and museums, but it was one experience in particular that helped turn Smith’s attention toward New York.

When public arts organization Creative Time received the Meadows Prize in 2011, Smith heard then-president and artistic director Anne Pasternak present the organization’s recommendations for strengthening Dallas’ arts community. Inspired by its work, Smith moved to New York the following year to become a programming intern at Creative Time. And though she initially arrived with a background as an artist, Smith soon discovered that she found equal fulfillment in supporting the work of others. 

“I discovered upon moving to New York City that I liked to collaborate with other people and found fulfillment and satisfaction working with artists to elevate their voices,” she explains. “I sort of landed in the commercial art world and quickly realized there's a lot of education in bringing art to the general public, and that felt quite creative even though I was selling art.” 

In her late twenties, Smith met artists Chris Dorland and David Deutsch, and the three took a leap of faith by founding Magenta Plains with the goal of fostering dialogue between emerging and established artists and building a platform for artistic discovery in order to support more experimental projects.

“Ten years later, we still believe in the energy of the unexpected,” says Smith. “As we look toward the next decade, we want to keep that sense of possibility alive—to stay creative, remain curious, and build a future that continues to surprise us.”

Though she is based in New York, Smith remains connected to Meadows as a member of the Meadows 2050 Council where she helps envision the school’s future and mentors current students. Staying involved has also given her a chance to reflect on her own transition from college into an evolving professional life.

Years after her professors encouraged her to experiment freely and pursue unexpected ideas, Smith now creates that same sense of possibility for the artists she represents. Her role may have shifted from making her own work to championing the work of others, but the creative foundation she developed at Meadows remains central to how she approaches each new opportunity.

“The evolution for me has been from being an artist myself to now being a representative for other artists, amplifying their ideas,” says Smith. “I’ve learned something every day. It’s always a new challenge. I look forward to the next key moment.”