Peter Mars Ð No ordinary artist. Born in Portland Oregon in 1959, Peter Mars began collecting at an early age: matchbooks, comic books, baseball crds, arrowheads and coins. Mars gathered small treasures that tell the story of American popular culture. Peter Mars has been the leader of Chicago's Pop Art movement for the past 35 years. Combining avant-garde innovation with a deep Pop Art sensibility, Mars fuses and confuses the traditional distinctions between high culture and low art.