Samuel Peters was born in Arkansas in 1939. Following graduation from Arkansas's Central High in 1958, the year of the school's integration crisis, Peters spent two years at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville followed by two years at Little Rock University. In 1962, his work was accepted for the first time in the Arkansas Arts Center's annual Delta exhibition. In 1967 Cinzano was awarded the purchase prize and entered the Art Center's permanent collection. Since that time, Peters has become a fairly regular fixture of the Delta. Peters has also enjoyed considerable success exhibiting elsewhere in the state and nationally. In 1992, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two years later was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Arts Center, which traveled to venues in New Mexico, Nevada, and Georgia. The Arkansas-born Peters became an abstract painter in the 1980s.