SANDRA ZALMAN

Sandra Zalman is an internationally known scholar of modern art, having presented her work in Amsterdam, Bern, London, Montreal, and Paris, and cities across the United States. She is the author of Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism which was supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Association of University Women. Consuming Surrealism dealt extensively with the politics of display in museums and the marketplace, exploring how Surrealism’s popularity affected the reception of its avant-garde ideals in the U.S. over the course of half a century (1936-1986). It was recognized with the 2016 Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship from the Southeastern College Art Conference and a 2016 Award for Research Excellence from the University of Houston.

Dr. Zalman’s writing has appeared as feature articles in Art Journal, Grey Room, Histoire de l’Art, Journal of Art Historiography, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Modernism/modernity, Tate Research Papers, Woman’s Art Journal, and the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, where she has served as an editor since 2012. She also writes art criticism, and has published reviews in Brooklyn Rail, CAA.reviews, and Panorama: The Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art among other arts publications. 

In 2020, Dr. Zalman co-edited the anthology Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment (1929-1949) which examines MoMA’s eclectic presentation of modernism in its first twenty years, with chapters analyzing exhibitions of rugs, news photography and model homes. 

In her new book, Dr. Zalman unpacks how the modernist canon came to exist, especially analyzing the history of the Museum of Modern Art. Far from inevitable, the canon arose from overlapping, often contradictory forces: political convictions, legal battles, financial pressures, architectural expansions, workplace dynamics, queer culture, and finally, aesthetic ideals.

Her research has been supported by major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Dedalus Foundation’s Senior Fellowship. 

Her most recent article “What Did MoMA Mean for Women: Gender and Belonging at the Museum of Modern Art” was published in the Journal of Curatorial Studies. Expanding on research supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, she is currently working on a chapter for the forthcoming volume Queer Surrealism: Methods for Art and Life that examines the painter Pavel Tchelitchew’s exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in 1964. 

Dr. Zalman is Associate Professor of Art History and affiliate faculty of the Center for Public History. Her courses are often cross-listed with Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. In 2024, she received the University’s Teaching Excellence Award. This year she received a grant from the College Art Association to take UH students to New York as part of her Surrealism and Its Legacies course.