M. T. Liggett, a gruff-talking, self-taught folk artist from Kansas whose roadside sculptures, signs and whirligigs often carried scabrous political messages and brought him a measure of fame, died on Aug. 17 in Wichita. He was 86.

His son James said the cause was renal failure. He learned he had brain cancer a year ago.

Mr. Liggett’s idiosyncratic scrap-metal gallery — conceived, shaped and welded in his shop nearby — stood on farmland in tiny Mullinville, where a stiff prairie wind kept the whirligigs spinning, lending kinetic energy to his hodgepodge of installations. His clownish, abstract, cartoonish and grotesque works reflected his bent for provocation.

“Most people, they ain’t got no guts,” he told RoadsideAmerica.com in 2002. “You gotta have a strong opinion or you’re nothing.”

He built a sculpture of Hillary Clinton, with a swastika for a torso, that he called “Our Jack-Booted Eva Braun.”