Shaila Dewan

In the thirteenth century, showman Arnaud de Villeneuve used a camera obscura to delight an audience with a shadow play avec sound effects. The fact that the audience stayed inside to witness the players' intrigue projected on the wall, when they could have been outside viewing the action, is early...

Perry House's densely layered, organically suggestive abstract paintings are not as far from figurative as you can get, but they're pretty far. So it was surprising that he wanted to look at paintings of real things from the Museum of Fine Arts' Beck Collection -- a Jean Frédéric Bazille al...

It is said that good writers borrow and great writers steal. In the belief that the same is true for newspapers, this week the Press begins a new feature modeled after New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman's conversations with artists, recently collected in a book titled Portraits: Talking with...

Let the bloodsport begin: The Millennial Biennial's roster of artists has been announced, and everyone's worst fears or best hopes have been confirmed. Now is the time to second-guess the curators. The Whitney Biennial, by the way, is the Whitney Museum of American Art's regular attempt to exhibit "the most...

Just a month or so ago, I was seated, much against my better judgment, on an inordinately large panel convened to discuss artists in the community, or the art community, or some such well-meaning topic. Doubtless there was among the 14 of us someone with something interesting to say, but...