Matthew Day Jackson: Yesterday’s Tomorrow

In the boom years after World War II, America built its idea of the future and moved in, filling millions of new suburban kitchens with Formica, laminate, and molded plywood: surfaces sold as clean, modern, and permanent. Matthew Day Jackson builds his paintings, furniture, and sculpture from these same materials, tracing centuries-old images and recasting them in the manufactured stuff of the American home. He arranges the works inside a house with no walls, an open steel frame you can walk through, its private interior turned fully out. The materials were sold as permanent, yet built to last about a lifetime, so a single object can hold aspiration and impermanence at once. That gap runs through the exhibition, which reaches from the kitchen counter to the moon landing, LIFE magazine, and the frontier, the many places America once pictured its future. Domestic Ideal turns that ideal to face several directions in time at once, asking what our pursuit of progress has actually built, and how the ideals we still carry will shape the lives that come after. On display through August 3, 2027. hilliardartmuseum.org.