of that year he showed as part of a University of Arizona Art Gallery faculty exhibition that included work by James Powell Scott, Warren Anderson, Douglas Dennison Maurice Grossman, Charles Littler and Andrew Rush. He received an honorable mention in the sculpture section of the Fine Arts Show at the Arizona State Fair in Phoenix in November 1960. By 1963, he was given a one-man show of drawings, woodcuts, oils and lithographs at the Workshop Center of the Arts in Tucson. The semi-abstract works featured motifs of men and motor cars, "recreating his subjects with original and evocative expression and certain humor." In October Mackaben was elected as president of the Tucson Artists Guild and able to turn to painting full-time and to experiment with different media including the mixing of Lucite with oils. Analyzing his works In 1968, on the occasion of his shows with the Chuck Winter Art Gallery, the Tucson Citizen wrote: "Mackaben’s work is represented in private collections in the United States, Mexico, Canada and the Far East. He has exhibited extensively for more than two decades and has won many awards in California. The 16 paintings […] are highlighted by his sympathetic portrayal of Mexicans. The plastic medium used by Mackaben seems to heighten his ingenuity in documenting out Arizona towns and the landscape which surrounds them." Tucson Daily Citizen art critic Alberta Friedlander wrote in conjunction with a 1972 solo exhibition that Mackaben's paintings are: "Social Realism, which reveals the customs and foibles of people in an exaggerated expressionist manner. At times his message is so broad as to border on cartooning. All are painted in very personal style and he uses acrylics in strong colors giving his canvases an overall textured surface with a tactile quality." A reviewer in 1974 saw a "slight debt to Ben Shahn" in Mackaben's recent paintings. Always actively involved in the community and its diverse needs, including mental health care and free clinics for the impoverished, Mackaben lived much as he painted—close to the people with all their joys and failings. He painted and printed the darker and more comic aspects of local life, moments of anguished protest and the earnest efforts of the locals to cultivate some semblance of pomp and circumstance in, as he put it, “our world’s comedy of errors.” Collections Mackaben's works are held in a number of collections including the Tucson Museum of