Background: Los Angeles artist Mark Andrew Allen's work today is a culmination of many years of painting, thinking and experiencing. He blends urban street art with his background of typography, mixed media collage, and abstract expressionism into each of his pop expressionist works to establish a particular narrative of our modern day culture. His artworks are in many notable collections and have been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Austin, New Jersey, and Chelsea Canada. Museums include The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum - Cleveland; Experience Music Project - Seattle; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; Acadia Museum - Lafayette, LA. He has had two art installations in the Rockefeller Center windows in New York and his art work has been included in several television shows and feature films. The Disney Channel purchased eight paintings for the Emmy winning TV show "Wizards of Waverly Place," starring Selena Gomez. Artist Statement: I had an ah-ha moment early in my life. My dad bought a book for me that opened my mind to great art being created. I think it was titled Ten American Artists That Are Making a Difference. Something like that. The point was, here was my dad, an artist himself, giving me a book on artists other than his own artist friends, and very good artists at that. He inscribed inside the book: "study these artists who are making a difference in the art world, and not the local-yokals." (living in Houston) In that book was Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Willem deKooning, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Joseph Cornell, and a few more. I studied those guys. (I eventually met three of them) I was hooked. I wanted to create great work like them. Each one of them was pushing their own limits to reach a new place in art. That is what I am interested in as well. I am interested in being an artist of my own time and expressing that narrative in my own way. - Mark Andrew Allen, dk Gallery mixed media collage artist