J.S.G. BOGGS (1955-2017)

Sitting in a Chicago diner in 1984, the artist Stephen Boggs began doodling on a paper napkin as he consumed a coffee and a doughnut. He started with the numeral 1, then transformed it into the image of a dollar bill.

His waitress, impressed, offered to buy it. Mr. Boggs refused, but presented it in payment for his 90-cent tab. The waitress handed him 10 cents in change.

For the next three decades, Mr. Boggs, better known by his artistic signature, J. S. G. Boggs, kept money on his mind. Extending the logic of the diner transaction, he painstakingly reproduced British pounds, Swiss francs and American dollars, with quirky deviations.

On American currency, for example, he might use the signature “J. S. G. Boggs, Secret of the Treasury,” or inscribe “Kunstbank of Bohemia” on a $5,000 bill, or append the motto “In Fun We Trust.” At first he created the notes one by one, a time-consuming process. Later he ran off limited-edition prints.

He presented his currency to merchants as payment for goods and services. If the bills were accepted, he asked for a receipt and, when appropriate, change. He noted the details of each transaction on the backs of his “Boggs bills,” which were blank, and sold the receipts to collectors. It was up to them to track down the merchant — for a fee, Mr. Boggs would assist — and negotiate purchase of the note.

The assembled elements were, in the opinion of Mr. Boggs and his admirers, artworks, exhibited as such in galleries around the world and included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.

“I create images that say things and ask things,” Mr. Boggs said in the 2013 Discovery Channel documentary “Money Man.” “I take them out into the real world and try to spend them, not as counterfeits, but as works of art that ask us about the nature of money.”

Law enforcement agencies in several countries took a different view. They regarded Mr. Boggs as a forger. They expressed this opinion, on several occasions, by seizing the notes or putting Mr. Boggs on trial.

The Tampa police discovered Mr. Boggs's body on Sunday in a motel near the Tampa airport. He was 62. Robert Salmon, manager of operations for the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner's Office, said the cause of death had not been determined.

He was born Stephen Litzner in Woodbury, N.J., on Jan. 16, 1955. (He later added the names James and George.) His mother, the former Marlene Dietrich Hildebrandt, divorced his father when Stephen was an infant, and nothing is known about him.

She joined a carnival, performed as “Margo, Queen of the Jungle,” and in 1961 married a Tampa businessman, Jim Boggs, with whom she ran the Brahman Lounge, a bar and package store. She later wrote a neighborhood column for The Tampa Tribune, reporting on the doings in Brandon, the Tampa suburb where she lived.

Mr. Boggs attended Brandon High School but was expelled in his junior year. “I was accused of starting a riot in the auditorium, but it was somebody else who threw the book at the principal,” he told the journalist Lawrence Weschler, who wrote a profile of Mr. Boggs for The New Yorker in 1988 that evolved into a book, “Boggs: A Comedy of Values,” published in 1999.

Over the years, Mr. Boggs, who leaves no immediate survivors, traded his bills for goods and services, from candy bars to motorcycles, whose worth he estimated at several million dollars.

In the mid-1990s, when Worth magazine asked him to design a note using the Treasury Department's new guidelines, Mr. Boggs produced a $100 bill with the image of Harriet Tubman as a young girl, anticipating by 20 years the announcement that Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson as the new face of the $20 bill. In 2001, he ran off a series of 100,000 plastic Sacagawea dollars, stamped with his own mint marks and paid for with a $5,000 Boggs bill.

Loren Gatch forwarded the original ARTnews story. -Editor

“I wouldn't have put it past Boggs to have faked his own death. I had a fantasy of him off in Switzerland, having a great time reading the obituaries. That would have been like him. He was an amazing trickster, a vivid, vivid character, and a consummate transgressor.

There were times when you weren't quite sure whether he was still in on the joke, if you will, because it was a very serious joke for him. He could seem authentically dumbfounded whenever he got arrested for counterfeiting.

He was just short of being a con man, but no more than anyone in the art world, or for that matter in the world of finance, which of course, was his whole point.”

I reconnected with Boggs recently and had a long phone conversation with him last year. We didn't talk about his recent troubles, which included a stint in jail which I believe was for violation of his parole terms following a drug conviction.

We talked at length about the U.S. Treasury's selection of Harriet Tubman and his depiction of her twenty years ago on the Women's Series note he designed for Worth magazine. He seemed to expect an upcoming outpouring in interest in his work and hinted of legal action against the government. He encouraged me to begin drafting an article about my collecting of his work for future sale to a national publication.

He was always a dreamer and an artist to the core. He had his personal demons, and was the very model of the classic tortured artist. I liked to say that he danced in the grey area at the edge of the law, a silver-tongued con man who could talk his way in or out of any situation.

I met his mother Marleen a few times, and she was a wonderful lady. I never asked about her carnival days, and maybe it's just as well. His waitress story may be apochrophal, and for all we know Margo, Queen of the Jungle was, too. While working in London I checked with the British Museum, which he'd said had acquired a piece of his art. They had no record of it. I later checked the online catalog of the Art Institute of Chicago, and came up empty there. I'm sure there are museums that hold his work, but I would be sure to verify such claims. He's left behind an interesting body of work and a story like no other.

Knowing him, he would have preferred being shot off a barstool by a jealous husband, one last act of performance art. Time will tell what becomes of his reputation as an artist. With all the articles, books, court records and documentaries there is no shortage of information about his work and antics, even if Boggs the person remains an enigma. To those of us who knew him, he's unforgettable. -Editor