About

Sandra Zalman is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Houston, where she teaches classes on modern and contemporary art, museums, and curatorial issues.

Her first book “Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism,” was recently issued in paperback. It won the 2016 SECAC Award for Excellence in Research and Publication and was supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Association of University Women. She has also received an arts writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and a Publication Grant from the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a senior fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation, she is currently working on a book about how museums of modern art expanded their cultural footprint at mid-century, using innovative architecture to advance competing ideas of modern art. She is especially interested in how museums frame art for public consumption. To that end, she co-edited a volume on the Museum of Modern Art’s first twenty years “Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment 1929-1949.”

Zalman’s research has appeared as feature articles in Art Journal, Grey Room, Histoire de l’Art, Modernism/modernity, Woman’s Art Journal, Tate Research Publications, the Journal of Art Historiography and the Journal of Surrealism in the Americas, where she is also an editor. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Southern California and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Associate Professor of Art History
Program Director of Art History
University of Houston