Born in Portland, Oregon in 1959, Peter Mars always exhibited talent in the visual and performing arts. Uncomfortable with the pressure of performing on his musical instruments, he turned to creating art, instead. He collected baseball cards, comic books, and images from magazines, amassing a selection of things that he personally found beautiful. While Mars earned his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Reed College in 1982, he soon moved to New Orleans, Louisiana to immerse himself in the excitement and culture of the French Quarter. He spent his nights painting and his days working in a gallery.

It was during this time that Mars discovered the work of Alexander Calder, with its “big, broad, flat, sweeping strokes of color.” Upon discovering Calder’s preferred medium for these prints was serigraphy, he decided, “I have to learn how to do that, whatever it is.” Eventually he met Dale Milford who agreed to teach Mars all that he needed to make his own silkscreen prints. With this knowledge in his repertoire, in 1988 he made a bold decision to move to Chicago, one of the leading art communities in the United States, where he has become one of the leaders of the Avant Pop movement. In addition to numerous prestigious exhibitions over the years, his work can be found in the collections of Sheryl Crow, Sandra Bernhard, and Betsey Johnson, and in the corporate collections of the Carroll Shelby’s Children’s Foundation, and the Children’s Discovery Museum of the Desert.

Inspired by early British pop art of the 1950s and by the 1920s Dadaists, Mars explains, “my artwork falls somewhere between Dada and Pop, in that area where nonsense and popular culture so frequently meet.” Many of his creations are also inspired by the world in which he grew up and by the pictures he cut out of magazines as a child. He also makes a point of rejecting the principles of “high art,” which he says alienate viewers by requiring historical perspective and prerequisite knowledge. Instead, Mars finds that creating, viewing, and collecting art is about “being joyful, having fun, like when you were a little kid, and seeing beauty in everyday things.”