Lecture and Reception: Erni Cabat – Can creativity be taught? William L. Bird, Jr.

Event Details

Artist and advertising man Erni Cabat thought so. Illustrated with art from his pre-war commercial career in New York and the Cabat-Gill Advertising Agency in postwar Tucson, this talk explores the tension between art and the necessity of making a living. Migrating from business to the production of full-time art in the 1960s, Cabat applied the promotional techniques with which he was most familiar to the merchandising of his hand-built slab ceramics and watercolor paintings, as well as hands-on talks on “creative problem-solving” in which the solution was inevitably ceramic. In the end, Cabat enjoyed his most lasting success as a beloved teacher, and as the marketer of his ceramicist wife Rose’s pinch-neck porcelain pot “Feelies.”

Before and following the lecture, guests are invited to a reception at Copenhagen Imports and to explore the Tucson Modernism Week exhibition devoted to Cabat-Gill’s remarkable graphic legacy. Through original advertisements, publications, photographs, and archival material, the exhibition reveals how a Tucson agency helped invent and promote an enduring image of the modern desert Southwest.