Artist, curator, and director of White Columns Matthew Higgs will interview the artist Elizabeth Peyton using a list of questions contributed by twenty artists, curators, critics, and others who are familiar with Peyton's work.

From her earliest portraits of musicians like Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, and Jarvis Cocker to more recent paintings featuring friends and figures from the worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics, including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matthew Barney, and Marc Jacobs, Elizabeth Peyton's body of work presents a chronicle of America at the end of the last century. A painter of modern life, Peyton's small, jewel-like portraits are also intensely empathetic, intimate, and even personal. Together, her works capture an artistic zeitgeist that reflects the cultural climate of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.

Matthew Higgs is an artist, curator, and writer based in New York. He is the Director and Chief Curator of White Columns, New York’s oldest alternative art space, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2009. In 1995 Higgs published an untitled artist's book by Elizabeth Peyton and in 2005 he wrote the introduction to Peyton's first monograph.