Pippa Garner, Conceptual Artist With a Satirical Streak, Dies at 82

Pippa Garner, a conceptual art provocateur whose radically modified consumer goods — like a midriff-baring men’s “Half Suit” and a ’59 Chevy with its chassis reversed — offered witty commentary on gender, body modification, American car culture and the boundaries of fine art, died on Dec. 30 in Los Angeles. She was 82.

Her death, at a convalescent hospital, was confirmed by Christopher Schwartz of Stars Gallery in Los Angeles, which represented her. She had a number of health problems, most notably chronic lymphocytic leukemia, he said. She had gone through gender transitioning in the mid-1980s.

Though Ms. Garner’s drawings, sculptures and inventions typically had a satirical bite, they were driven not by any political agenda so much as by her sheer curiosity about herself and the world she lived in. As a result, they were, typically, very entertaining.

Before 2015, when she began an explosive run of exhibitions accompanied by the publication of two monographs — “Act Like You Know Me” and “Pippa Garner: $ell Your $elf” — Ms. Garner was best known for “Philip Garner’s Better Living Catalog,” a compilation of her fantastical, flagrantly unnecessary gadgets and accessories. It was published in 1982, under her birth name, before she transitioned.

The volume showcased, among other things, lowrider roller skates, a birdbath Jacuzzi, a palm-frond umbrella and a device for shooting garbage out your kitchen window.

The book made a splash, and Ms. Garner soon appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” to promote the “Half-Suit” (while wearing it).

Ms. Garner briefly trained as an industrial designer and served in the U.S. Army as a combat artist during the Vietnam War before becoming a prolific photographer and sketch artist.

For years she made a living providing precise, whimsical drawings of inventions, like those in the “Better Living Catalog,” for magazines, including Rolling Stone, Esquire and Playboy. She liked to point out that her work in those venues was seen by hundreds of thousands of people rather than the few hundred who might visit an art gallery.

“I think it’s possible to be a highly creative artist in any medium you want, and it can be a commercial medium,” she said in a 2019 interview.

At the same time, she pursued ambitious, often automobile-focused art projects, many of which were lost or destroyed. One — a sculpture of an anthropomorphic car raising its leg over a map of Detroit — got her expelled from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Calif.

Sometimes her magazine connections converged with her more unconventional work. In 1974, Esquire magazine funded, and then published an article about, a work she called “Backwards Car,” for which she removed, reversed and reattached the chassis of a 1959 Chevrolet sedan so that, when she took it out over the Golden Gate Bridge, it looked like she was driving backward.

Among other automotive creations were a “nauti-mobile,” a car with a yacht-like cockpit; and “The World’s Most Fuel-Efficient Car,” a 1972 Honda powered by recumbent bicycles. (For her own everyday transportation, Ms. Garner preferred human-powered wheels, and she held a patent on a type of push scooter.)

In recent decades, in a series she called “Shirtstorm,” she worked with T-shirts, printing one-off slogans on them, or ironing them on; among them, “Iraqi Horror Picture Show,” “I’d rather Butter myself than Better myself,” “Nothing Exists That Wasn’t There in The First Place” and “These Are My Remains.”

Ms. Garner began her gender transition in 1986 after doctors refused to prescribe hormones to her without a therapist’s note, leading her to take doses of estrogen obtained illicitly. In 1988, she sold a print by the artist Ed Ruscha, an acquaintance, to pay for breast implants. Later, she had a bra and panties tattooed on her body.

She spoke forthrightly, if not always consistently, about her transition, sometimes recalling her discomfort with every aspect of the identity she was born into, white and middle-class included. Most often she described the process as just another creative experiment.

“With a sex change,” she said, “you’re making a visual statement.”

In her telling, this framing of her transition alienated other artists and trans people alike, at least initially. But it also anticipated contemporary questions about what counts as art and how we think about gender — and it encapsulated her overall approach to life.

“Her body, her life — it’s all source material,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview. “She lived it. It’s real.”

Or as Ms. Garner herself put it in an interview in The New York Times Magazine in 2023: “I thought, with all this energy that I was putting into altering consumer appliances from the assembly line, can’t that be adapted to the human body? If I can work with a waffle iron, why not the body? I already have one, and it’s for me to decide what I want to do with it.”

Ms. Garner, who took the middle name Venus, was born in Evanston, Ill., on May 22, 1942, to Richard and Mary (Hubbard) Garner. Her father was an advertising executive with McCall’s magazine. Her mother earned a master’s degree in English after overseeing the home for some time.

Ms. Garner had a younger sister from whom she was apparently estranged. A marriage to the painter Nancy Reese, who introduced Ms. Garner to the art scene in the late 1970s, ended in divorce. No information on survivors was available.

Ms. Garner’s family moved around the Midwest when she was a child, and though she drew and tinkered constantly, she struggled in school. She eventually passed through several art schools before being drafted into the Army in 1965. As an adult, she lived in Los Angeles, London, the Bay Area, Santa Fe, N.M., and Long Beach, Calif.; socialized with artists like Mr. Ruscha and Chris Burden; and worked with the Bay Area avant-garde collective Ant Farm.

Her work began getting wider attention in 2015, when it appeared at the Spring/Break Art Show at Moynihan Station in New York. Solo exhibitions at Redling Gallery in Los Angeles followed, in 2017 and 2018. Her first institutional solo show in Europe, “Act Like You Know Me,” opened at the Kunstverein Munich in 2022 before traveling to Zurich; Metz, France; and New York. Her first American museum solo, “Pippa Garner: $ell Your $elf,” opened at Art Omi, in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, in 2023.

Ms. Garner also participated in the Hammer Museum’s biennial in Los Angeles in 2023 and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s biennial in New York in 2024. A current show, “Misc. Pippa,” her second solo at Stars Gallery, opened in November.

She was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia in about 2010. The condition was linked to exposure to Agent Orange, an herbicide used by the American military in Vietnam. Over the last decade or so she also lost her sight to glaucoma.

Interviews, like everything, were creative opportunities for Ms. Garner, but her bons mots would have been far less striking without their ring of truth. Asked last year what advice she would give to a young artist who looked up to her, she replied, “I tried to set an example that nobody else can follow.”