Schaeffer Fine Art Library

Roger Benjamin (Professor of Art History, U of Sydney) has written and lectured on Matisse throughout his career, beginning with his Bryn Mawr PhD (Matisse’s ‘Notes of a Painter’: Criticism, Theory and Context, Ann Arbor 1987).  He co-curated QAG’s touring retrospective Matisse of 1995 before turning to questions of European Orientalism. His most recent publication on the Frenchman was “Matisse at the Senya el Hashti” in The Art Bulletin for 2019.

Simryn Gill is an artist whose work spans photography, drawing, printing, object making and writing. Gill articulates the poetics of history, power and identity that striate the places and environments between which she lives and moves. With Tom Melick she runs Stolon Press, a small publisher of books and pamphlets in Sydney. In 2023 Gill's work was shown at MCA, Sydney; Barbican, London; Singapore Art Museum; Linnaen Society, London. Gill has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Singapore Biennale (2006), documenta (2007, 2012), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2022), Venice Biennale (2013) and Dhaka Art Summit (2018), Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2024).

Yvonne Low is a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. She specializes in Asian modernities, gender and sexuality in Asian art, and curatorial practice, teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Her research recovers marginalized histories in Southeast Asian art and Chinese diaspora cultures, with particular focus on women's practices and artist’s networks. She employs decolonial, feminist, and digital methodologies to challenge canonical art histories and develop new frameworks for studying artists excluded from dominant modernist narratives – including watercolourists, left-aligned practitioners, and those working across amateur-professional boundaries from the colonial period to the present. Since co-convening the inaugural 2017 international symposium on Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories, she has actively built this interdisciplinary field through multiple channels. She has co-organised three exhibitions on women's art and archives, and serve on the editorial committee of Southeast of Now Journal and advisory boards for major regional initiatives including “The Flow of History: Southeast Asian Women Artists” (AWARE/AAA) and “The Womanifesto Way” (Power Institute, DFAT). Current collaborative projects include a special issue on Feminist Writings in Southeast Asian Art and the Artists Trajectories Map (ArTM), a digital tool advancing comparative research methodologies. 

Mary Roberts is Professor of Art History and Nineteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sydney. Her scholarship focuses on European Orientalist and modern Ottoman art, with particular interest in artistic exchanges, histories of collecting, and the various ways in which Orientalist images are mediated in paintings, travelogues, interiors, and news media. Her work lies at the intersection of modernism and Orientalism, and traces global networks that inform nineteenth-century European and Islamic art. Her books include: Istanbul Exchanges. Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (University of California Press, 2015), awarded AAANZ’s Best Book Prize, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Duke University Press, 2007) and four co-edited books: The Poetics and Politics of Place (Pera Museum, 2011) Edges of Empire (Blackwells, 2005), Orientalism’s Interlocutors (Duke, 2002) and Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried (Power Publications, 2000). In 2023, she coedited a major translation project: Victor Marie De Launay et al., Ottoman Architecture: A Study Published for the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair (Gorgias, 2023). Her next book, Four Thresholds: Orientalist Interiors, Islamic Art, the Aesthetics of Global Modernities, is under contract with University of Chicago Press.

Simryn Gill is an artist whose work spans photography, drawing, printing, object making and writing. Gill articulates the poetics of history, power and identity that striate the places and environments between which she lives and moves. With Tom Melick she runs Stolon Press, a small publisher of books and pamphlets in Sydney. In 2023 Gill's work was shown at MCA, Sydney; Barbican, London; Singapore Art Museum; Linnaen Society, London. Gill has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Singapore Biennale (2006), documenta (2007, 2012), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2022), Venice Biennale (2013) and Dhaka Art Summit (2018), Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2024).

Claudia Nicholson is an artist and educator who works with painting, photography, installation and video. Recent projects include ‘Oh’ a new animated artwork made in collaboration with writer Enoch Mailangi and children from the Sydney Children’s Hospital School. ‘Oh’ is a story about the power of friendship told through unfolding conversations between animals. In 2020 she created ‘Art Trail’, an illustrated children's activity guide for the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Australia. Claudia’s video artwork ‘By Your Side’ 2019 is currently on exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. 'By Your Side' was co-created by artist Claudia Nicholson and six young people whose families were seeking asylum in Australia at the time.