Born in 1957 and originally a math teacher, Pettibon earned a degree in economics from the University of California in Los Angeles. It was not until the mid-1970s that he was inspired by cartoons, comics, and other pop-culture images, in order to design cover art for Punk and Rock music bands such as Sonic Youth, before he eventually began work as an artist. He started to exhibit his work in the mid-1980s, and has since held numerous major exhibitions at institutions including the Whitney Museum in New York, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and in 2017, he was the subject of a major retrospective at the New Museum in New York. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.