Monday, December 7, 2020 at 7:59PM Published for Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency | "Rope Walker" Podcast; July 31, 2020
Olivia Smith is director of Magenta Plains Gallery in NYC, has exhibited Linnea Kniaz’s work, and is a longtime friend of this residency program. She and Linnea unravel various threads in this conversation.
Monday, December 7, 2020 at 7:50PM Published on www.ft.com; May 1, 2020 by Melanie Gerlis
Olivia Smith in front of work by Don Dudley © Don Stahl
Olivia Smith, co-founder of the Lower East Side gallery Magenta Plains, is blessed with a positive mindset — and a can-do attitude. “There are some severe obstacles to doing business right now, but we do have the opportunity to engage, to educate and to entertain, rather than focusing too much on sales,” she tells me over Zoom from Dallas, where she has decamped to join her artist boyfriend, Israel Lund, during the US lockdown.
Smith is, however, a little nostalgic for the pre-Covid days as she prepares to show work by the in-demand, mid-career, American artist Zach Bruder on the inaugural Frieze Viewing Room that replaces the New York fair this week. “It’s normally our busiest time of the year,” Smith explains, echoing the experience of many of her counterparts who would normally benefit from the art market’s high season between March and June.
Her gallery managed to show for the third time running at this year’s Independent fair, which closed on March 8, just before New York Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency. Smith describes the week of Independent — which also coincided with a show opening and her 32nd birthday — as “an incredible time, the last hurrah”. Since then, it’s all been distinctly virtual.
In the run-up to Frieze, Magenta Plains showed on the Dallas Art Fair’s online viewing room and Smith is grateful to the organisers of both events for changing tack and keeping “some semblance of normalcy” to the art market calendar. “Our artists have been preparing their work around these fairs,” she says.
Bruder, whose haunting, surreal paintings combine familiar folklore with contemporary culture, was understandably “incredibly disappointed” that the fair was cancelled, Smith says, but has at least been able to build on the growing support for his work by making new pieces for the solo online showing (priced up to $10,000).
Zach Bruder's 'Bounty' (2020)
Smith is also very grateful to David Zwirner gallery, which included Magenta Plains on its first Platform, an initiative that gave a big helping hand to 12 of New York’s smaller galleries by hosting them and one of their artists on its high-tech website between April 3 and May 1. “It’s been great to have the Zwirner platform, and so good to show with those other galleries, as we were trying to work out how best to adapt to the new situation,” Smith says. She showed and sold works by Nathaniel Robinson on Platform, a good continuation of the gallery’s success with him at the Independent fair, she says.
Smith, a trained artist, co-founded the gallery just four years ago with two other practising artists, Chris Dorland and David Deutsch. She is responsible for the day-to-day management, including adapting to the new normal. “We are a young gallery, with limited resources, so I was already doing things like IGTV [Instagram’s video application] and using social media, though more sporadically,” Smith says. Before joining forces with Dorland and Deutsch, Smith had spent three years running Exhibition A, an online platform for contemporary art editions. Her subsequent grip of social media and other e-commerce marketing skills has come in handy: for the Dallas fair, Smith narrated a dedicated IGTV video to accompany the work of Don Dudley and the gallery plans the same for Zach Bruder during Frieze. “We’re putting work out there as best we can,” she says.
Since closing the physical gallery in March, “We’ve done our own, homegrown version of an online viewing room,” Smith says, with characteristic modesty. This is currently hosting the planned solo show by the American artist Jennifer Bolande, The Composition of Decomposition (until May 31), recently reviewed by the New York Times as one of only two exhibitions worth viewing virtually. “For an artist who hasn’t had a solo show in New York for 12 years to get a review during a pandemic feels pretty special,” Smith admits.
'Endeavor' (2019) by Zach Bruder
Her gallery is also rooted in an agile and collaborative ethos that seems to sit well in these complicated times. As well as being founded by three artists — Smith refers to it as artist-led though emphasises “we’re still a commercial entity” — some of its artists are also adept gallerists. These include Peter Nagy, who ran Nature Morte in New York’s East Village and now in New Delhi, and the sculptor Tiril Hasselknippe, who had a gallery in Malmö. “It’s not a formal mission but there’s certainly a spirit of hands-on collaboration,” Smith says. To come up with its distinctive name of Magenta Plains, its three founders played what Smith describes as “an Excel version of the Surrealist ‘Exquisite Corpse’ game”, until they found the words on which all three could agree.
Helping to keep spirits up has been the gallery’s membership of the New Art Dealers Alliance (Nada), which has enabled its many small enterprises to communicate and act together during the Covid-19 crisis so far. “There’s been some good camaraderie between the Lower East Side galleries, and the Nada forum has been a safe place to ask questions,” Smith says. These mostly concern rent relief for their empty galleries and the availability of grants for artists, “Things we are all trying to figure out,” Smith says. As things currently stand, the majority of galleries are not eligible for the business relief for which other small businesses can apply in the US.
Such additional concerns, plus the pivoting towards a purely online audience, mean that Smith’s workload is intense: “I’m still pouring myself into the gallery,” she says. Like many of us, she misses seeing art in real life, though doesn’t have time for some of the alternative cultural fixes out there. She is, however, trying to exercise more, cook, speak to her friends and even write poetry, something she used to do more regularly. In her words: “It’s about how to maintain my spirit, health, relationships and the gallery just now.”
Monday, December 7, 2020 at 7:43PM 
The reality of inter-gallery relationships is, of course, much more nuanced. For Olivia Smith, a cofounder of Lower East Side venue Magenta Plains, her gallery’s participation in Platform is a recognition of the vital importance of galleries like hers within the larger arts ecosystem. “I think that the Zwirner platform is an acknowledgement of that work that we do . . . . It really seems like he believes that we have a stake in this just as much as he does, or his level of galleries do. I think that it’s been incredibly collaborative.”
Monday, December 7, 2020 at 7:32PM Review of Against The Best Possible Sources, curated by Olivia Smith
Published on www.dallasnews.com; Oct 24, 2019 by Lee Cullum
These details from a 1984 research manual were among the images found by photographer Elizabeth Moran in the archives of Time Inc. (Elizabeth Moran)
Hamon Arts Library owes special thanks to Olivia Smith, an SMU alumna and director of Magenta Plains, a contemporary art gallery in New York, for spotting Moran and bringing her work to Dallas. As curator, Smith felt drawn to the way Moran was “diving so far into projects … driven more by research, centered on using texts and text sources.”
Smith also liked the connection to journalism and the opportunity to broaden the show to other disciplines for students while anchoring the work in “discrete objects” — old bookshelves cast off by the Hamon “diagonally cutting through the gallery” and “bookends fabricated by Elizabeth,” evoking New York’s 42nd Street Library there at the Hamon.
Monday, December 7, 2020 at 7:17PM FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Against the Best Possible Sources is part of an ongoing project by Elizabeth Moran involving extensive research of the TIME, Inc. corporate archive and an investigation of the earliest history of the first professional journalistic fact-checkers, a role created by TIME in 1923 and held exclusively by women until 1971. Few first-person accounts of the women’s experiences remain. Instead, the majority of their stories are found only through internal correspondences with their male colleagues still preserved in the company’s archives: hand-drawn cartoons, scribbled notes, and reminiscences capture the prevailing sexism of the time—a sustained male gaze through which the women and their work was seen, recorded, and mythologized.
In this site specific installation, Moran recomposes these questionable, secondary sources creating a new narrative that is both unreliable but also the most comprehensive account of the first fact-checkers that exists today. Against the Best Possible Sources consists of decommissioned library shelves sourced from SMU’s Hamon Arts Library, decommissioned library books, dye-sublimation printed steel bookends, stamped photocopies created by TIME, Inc. archive librarians, and a decommissioned Kodak Carousel 860H slide projector with eighty 35mm slides. In her accompanying audio piece, Moran utilizes creative nonfiction strategies including a newly commissioned musical duet to unveil the simultaneous presence and absence of these women and their contribution to modern journalism.
Reacting against the sensationalized, tabloid journalism of the Progressive Era, TIME originally advertised their reporting as “written after the most exhaustive scrutiny of news-sources” with confirmed, reliable facts as its primary innovation and product. Indeed founders Henry Luce and Briton Hadden originally considered naming the weekly news magazine Facts. However this “exhaustive scrutiny” was considered women’s work from its inception: employment requirements found in early fact-checking manuals specified that checkers must be under age thirty, must be blonde, must wear stockings and specific gloves depending on the time of year, must wear hatpins under 6-inches in length and that checkers must maintain their “domestic list of chores.”
While female fact-checkers were considered subordinate to the male staff writers, the checkers had the power to kill any story that they could not verify—a decision that would impact a writer’s income. One such writer, Roger S. Hewlett, rewrote the lyrics to American composer Irving Berlin’s major Broadway hit, “You’re Just In Love,” and sarcastically serenaded the checkers whenever they would kill one of his stories. For this exhibition, Moran commissioned young Broadway singers to perform Hewlett’s rendition, “Checking Time (A duet in descant),” which flagrantly includes the refrain, “They’re not lies, they’re just not true.”
Nancy Ford was hired in early 1923 as the organization’s first fact-checker. As such, Ford laid the groundwork for fact-checking processes still in use to this day by supplying and verifying the facts for TIME, Inc.’s writers. The only three reference books available to her and her colleagues were The Bible, Homer’s Iliad, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. For any other references or research, the early checkers went to the New York Public Library, which they used as a second office. By 1929 the female employees began organizing their years of research for TIME into their own in-house library, nicknamed the Morgue. By the 1960s, the Morgue had grown to include 83,000 books and 500,000 folders of reference material and continued expanding through the 1990s when it was renamed the Time Warner Research Center. Over time, the primary sources used by the fact-checkers have been retired into storage or eliminated completely. Following a merger in 2001, AOL Time Warner announced the closing of the Research Center and laid-off its thirty-six full-time researchers. The archive is now housed within the New York Historical Society in Manhattan.
In this exhibition, Moran conflates this loss of primary sources with the untold stories and contributions of the early fact-checkers through photography, text, sound, and other forms of recorded documentation. The ten-minute audio narration by the artist is constructed from found texts sourced exclusively from the TIME, Inc. archive and published in this booklet as a visual collage. Presented in the installation as stereo sound, Moran has chosen to position male narration and supposedly objective information through the left speaker, while women’s subjective statements in the first person can be heard through the right speaker. The result, a ping-ponging chorus of anonymous voices all told and equalized through the artist’s own. Decommissioned library shelves found at SMU are presented as skeletal remains emptied of their contents. Scattered throughout the shelves are artist-made bookends rendered useless save for their surfaces, which display images of found artifacts and office materials entombed in TIME, Inc.’s archive. Only decommissioned library books of The Bible, Homer’s Iliad, and Xenophon’s Anabasis linger, replicating TIME’s first library now deemed unwanted.
The Kodak Carousel slide projector flickers in the back of the gallery briefly illuminating photographs, internal memos, records, and other ephemera which shed light on the original fact-checkers. The slide projector itself, first patented in 1965 and discontinued in 2004, presents a media technology that was both invented and subsequently discarded within the time period of Moran’s research. The projected images were made with Moran’s cell phone during her visits to the archive and were translated into slide film for this exhibition. This photo montage displays the employees and environment of TIME, Inc. and are not presented in chronological order. The artist’s hand can be seen arranging and proffering these documents—the limb of a disembodied researcher comingling with the unidentified individuals in the pictures. Visually presented in an analog format which exudes a credible formality, the eighty 35mm film slides—blasted by the light and heat of the mechanical operations—will degrade over time.
Through her own inquiry, Moran embodies the processes of these women by reperforming their meticulous labor, and her own subjectivity—her selection of texts, images, and choices in framing and cropping of photographs—becomes the buried content the viewer unearths. A swirling experience of theatrics, Moran’s installation moves in and out of various time periods like shadow play, sound and image bleeding together into an almost ungraspable abstraction. As one TIME, Inc. memo from 1967 states, “Without highly sophisticated methods of addressing stored data, we are lost.” Amid decommissioned objects and archaic technology, Moran positions her research as verifiable, interrogating the historical association between women’s work and fact-checking, while simultaneously examining the reliability of the information itself.
Artist Biography
Elizabeth Moran’s (b. 1984, Houston, TX) project-based practice examines the reliance on alleged objectivity within personal and societal systems of belief. Moran has received fellowships from the The San Francisco Foundation and the Tierney Family Foundation. Solo exhibitions include Cuchifritos Gallery, New York, NY; Black Crown Gallery, Oakland, California; and NYU's Gulf and Western Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, California; and Studio la Città, Verona, Italy. She has been an artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center, New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation, Wassaic Project, Artists Alliance Inc’s LES Studio Program, and Rayko Photo Center. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, WIRED, VICE, and British Journal of Photography, among others. Moran holds an MFA + MA in Visual & Critical Studies from California College of the Arts and a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Curator Biography
Olivia Smith (b. 1988, Dallas, TX) received her BFA in 2011 from SMU Meadows School of the Arts in Studio Art, Art History, and English, with a concentration in Poetry. After concluding an internship at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, she moved to New York City in 2012. Smith is the co-founder and director of Magenta Plains, a contemporary art gallery opened in March 2016 and located in the Lower East Side of NYC. One of the core missions at the gallery is to bring greater attention to significant art and artists regardless of age or career and to present context and meaning for the development of new ideas as well as to preserve older generation artists' work. Among the thirty exhibitions to date at the gallery, Smith has organized critically acclaimed exhibitions with computer art pioneer Lillian Schwartz (b. 1927), minimalist painter Don Dudley (b. 1930), and avant-garde legend Barbara Ess (b. 1948). Exhibitions at Magenta Plains have been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, Art In America, The Nation, Forbes, The New York Observer, Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, Artnews, Artinfo, Artnet, and more.
