Born in Brooklyn at the height of the Depression, Peter Wexler was an avid fan of the arts from a young age. As a child he attended Children's Concerts at Carnegie Hall and children's art classes at MoMA. He spent his summers as a teen as an apprentice to the Cleveland Playhouse in Chautauqua, New York (the Cleveland Playhouse's summer home), and then as the assistant scenic artist to Ed Gallager for the Chautauqua Opera Association.

In high school he spent his afternoons designing for school productions and drawing at the Art Student's League, while spending his evenings serving as one of Rudolf Bing's first acting, dance student-supers at the Metropolitan Opera. At the University of Michigan's School of Architecture and Design, Wexler studied painting, photography, and design, and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Design, after which he enrolled in the Graduate School of Drama at Yale.

Wexler's career included tremendous achievements in collaborative art, as he worked in scene, costume, and lighting design and as a producer in theatre, opera, music, television, and film. On Broadway, he designed for such shows as Murderous Angels, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, Camino Real, and In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, while his off-Broadway designs include War and Peace at the Phoenix Theatre, Anthony and Cleopatra at the Hecksher Theatre, and Brecht on Brecht at the Theatre de Lys. He also designed operas for The Metropolitan Opera, and concerts for the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the L.A. Symphony, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the Denver Symphony Orchestra.

Wexler's television credits include designs for The Merv Griffin Show, the Cleo Awards Ceremony, and ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings; and his film credits extend to Andy (1965), Happy Time (1967), Camino Real (1970), The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1973), and Les Troyens (1973). He also helped establishe regional theatres, and consulted on the design of theatres and concert performance spaces. Serving as producer, he also worked on large outdoor music festivals for prominent artists and bands, such as Van Cliburn, Mstislav Rostropovich, the Dixie Chicks, and Willie Nelson; and large museum exhibitions for the Smithsonian Institution, among others.

Wexler received many awards for his work, and held 18 one-man shows.

Peter Wexler died on March 20, 2022, at the age of 85.