Pippa Garner: Act Like You Know Me

A comprehensive monograph of American artist Pippa Garner, ACT LIKE YOU KNOW ME surveys fifty years of her transdisciplinary art practice, from the late 1960s to the early 2010s, through photography, illustration, ephemera, and original writings.

Encompassing Garner’s most iconic works, from the Backwards Car to the Half-Suit, alongside never-before-seen photographs and ephemera, ACT LIKE YOU KNOW ME serves to introduce a highly-influential, under-recognized artist whose uncompromising approach to life and practice has allowed her to interact with the worlds of illustration, editorial, television, and art without ever becoming beholden to them.
Born in the suburbs of Chicago in 1942, the artist formerly known as Philip Garner has satirized American-style consumerism for decades, reifying the joys of everyday life and personal liberation along her way. With her prankish sense of humour and conceptual dedication to experimental engineering, she has altered materials of mass production—from Fordism through the pharmacopornographic era—subverting commercial binaries to reveal the transitory nature of material life and her own transpersonal identity.

ACT LIKE YOU KNOW ME is the first critical survey of Pippa Garner’s radical practice, supplementing exclusive visuals and texts by Garner with archival press materials on the artist from such notable figures as Glenn O’Brien, Ralph Rugoff, and Hayden Dunham, in addition to three new original commissions from contemporary, award-winning authors Shola von Reinhold, Dodie Bellamy, and Fiona Alison Duncan.