Pippa Garner, an artist known for her satirical commentary on American consumerism and gender norms, died on December 30th at 82. Since 2022, Garner had been battling leukemia, which she attributed to her exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
The announcement of Garner’s death was made via an Instagram account managed by her friends and collaborators. The post stated: “She wanted a trans president, universal healthcare, the end of testosterone toxicity overload and pet-troll-eum, hormones for all, lusty living to the very end.” The artist is currently the subject of two connected solo exhibitions, “Misc. Pippa,” at Matthew Brown in New York and STARS in Los Angeles.
Born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1942, Garner spent her early life in Detroit, where she briefly worked on a Chrysler assembly line. The artist was drafted into the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry during the Vietnam War, where she was assigned as a combat artist—documenting the war through photographs, sketches, and illustrations. Upon her return, she enrolled in the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles to study transportation design.
Garner’s work often explores themes of personal identity inspired by her background in automobiles and transportation. One standout example is Kar-Mann (Half-Human, Half-Car) (1969), a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia designed with the back half resembling the lower portion of a squatting person. Meanwhile, Backwards Car (1974), a 1959 Chevy engineered to appear as if it was driving backward, addressed excessive consumerism and mass production in the U.S.
Throughout her career, Garner has frequently employed her own body as a medium to challenge norms of gender expression. In the 1980s, the artist began her gender transition, referring to it as an “art project to create disorientation in my position in society, and sort of balk any possibility of ever falling into a stereotype again.”
A relatively unknown artist until the 2010s, Garner only presented one solo exhibition between 1986 and 2014, in 1997 at the Oakland Museum. In recent years, several prestigious institutions have presented solo shows of the artist’s work, including two retrospectives in 2023: “Act Like You Know Me” at White Columns and “$ELL YOUR $ELF” at Art Omi. Her work was also featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.
