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Jermayne Virginia MacAgy (née Jermayne Virginia Noble; February 14, 1914 – February 18, 1964) was an American art historian, museum professional, curator and professor. She also used the name Jermayne Smart.
She received a B.A. degree in art history from Radcliffe College in 1935. She spent 1936 and 1937 in graduate school at Harvard University, the second of these two years devoted entirely to professor Paul Sachs’ now famous class “Museum Work and Museum Problems” taught at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum. She continued her graduate work at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) where she studied the philosophy and psychology of art with Thomas Munro as a mentor. She gained her doctorate in philosophy at Western Reserve University with a 1939 dissertation on the folk art of the Western Reserve territory of Ohio.
She then started her career in the education department of the Cleveland Museum of Art and worked there from 1939–1941. She met Douglas MacAgy at the Cleveland Museum of art, and in 1941 they married. Although they later divorced, she used his name until her death.
Shortly before their marriage, the San Francisco Museum of Art had hired Douglas MacAgy as an assistant curator, and in March of that year Jermayne and Douglas moved to San Francisco.
In 1955, she became the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. There she "reinvented the space," especially by her use of new and diverse platforms of display that "included potted plants, beds of gravel and bark, temporary partitions, scrims, theatrical lighting, and pedestals of all shapes and sizes combined in unusual ways". Her exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Association include Mark Rothko in 1957, "The Trojan Horse: The Art of the Machine" in 1958, "The Common Denominator: Modern Design, 3500 BC- 1958 AD" in 1958, and "Romantic Agony: From Francisco Goya to de Kooning" in 1959. In 1959, she mounted her first exhibition at Mies van der Rohe's Cullinan Hall, a new wing of Houston's Museum of Fine Arts designed by Mies van der Rohe: "Totems Not Taboo: An Exhibition of Primitive Art," which earned accolades from Buckminster Fuller and Rene d'Harnoncourt, director of the Museum of Modern Art.
In 1959, she left the Contemporary Arts Museum to "teach art history and curate exhibitions for the University of St. Thomas" in Houston, Texas.
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