Mari Lyons (1935-2016) graduated in 1957 from Bard College, where Louis Schanker and Stefan Hirsch were her main art professors. She painted for most of her life, starting at an early age. By age 13 she was taking Saturday drawing classes at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. At 15, Lyons took a summer painting class at Mills College taught by Max Beckmann. He remained an influential force in her work. The following summer Lyons studied with Fletcher Martin, a representational artist who had been an artist/correspondent for Life Magazine, who was very encouraging. Lyons also spent approximately six months in Paris where she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere, at L'Atelier Fernand Leger, and at the Atelier 17 of painter/printmaker Stanley William Hayter. She received an MFA in painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan where she studied with the abstract landscape artist Fred Mitchell.

Lyons described herself as an "everyday painter," painting her everyday surroundings, every day. The content and breadth of her creative output is representative of this practice. Lyons produced thousands of works on paper and hundreds of oil paintings on canvas. Her pieces reflect the landscapes, objects and people which surrounded her. Landscapes drawn from the forest surrounding her Woodstock home, mountainscapes inspried by her visits to Montana while accompanying her husband Nick Lyons on flyfishing trips, and cityscapes painted from her view of Broadway from her studio in New York City.

Her first one-person exhibition was at the Polaris Gallery in Woodstock, when she was a senior at Bard, and thereafter she had one-person shows at the Forsythe Gallery in Ann Arbor, the First Street Gallery in New York, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, and Rider University.

In 2019 the Stevenson Library at Bard College held an exhibit of her works titled “Intimate Visions: The Life in Art of Mari Lyons (l935-2016).”