Pippa Garner is an artist of many in-betweens. Since studying automotive design at ArtCenter in the 1960s and serving in the U.S. Army as a combat illustrator during the Vietnam War, Garner has built a decades-long career that bridges the chasms dividing art from design, publishing, media, and lived experience. Always with an edge of sardonic wit, her absurdist yet accessible drawings, sculptures, and characters cast a satirist’s trenchant eye toward the systems of authority and myth that shaped the Boomer Generation’s American experience. Embarking, in the late ‘80s, on her self-described project of “gender hacking” caused an estrangement from L.A.’s art world at the time, as well as a recent resurgence of interest in her status as a pioneering trans artist.

To outsiders the place looked like a hippie colony, a place full of longhairs and dogs, children running free, and hand-held video cameras recording it all. Inside, it was a place of possibility. Although there were recognizable classes, the motivating idea was to create more informal spaces where artist teachers and their students discussed ideas and developed projects, most outside the traditional frameworks of art-making, projects that aimed to question the very institutional construction of art itself.