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.

The nervous breakdown will be televised: In the 1970’s, producer Norman Lear’s hit sitcoms tackled racism, feminism, and class struggle without losing the laugh track. His show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman aimed elsewhere: an ironic hybrid of soap opera and satire, the result was oddly real, unsettling, and sincere.