Memory is rarely a perfect record. Details shift, stories change with each retelling, and moments from years apart can begin to overlap. In Today/Tomorrow/Yesterday, artist Michael McCaffrey explores this uncertain space between memory and reality through a deeply personal subject: his father.
On view August 22 through November 8, 2026, at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, Today/Tomorrow/Yesterday brings together paintings, drawings, and collages created by McCaffrey since 2014. At the center of this body of work is the artist’s 87-year-old father, who has served as both muse and collaborator for more than a decade. Through these works, McCaffrey documents an evolving relationship between father and son while considering the stories, memories, and shared experiences that accumulate over a lifetime. His father appears again and again, but these works are not simply portraits. Instead, they become layered reflections on family, aging, time, and the complicated process of remembering. “Painting is remembering,” McCaffrey says. “I’m interested in what is remembered accurately, what is distorted, and what is invented through the act of remembering.”
Many of the works begin with real events, people, places, or objects, but McCaffrey allows memory and imagination to reshape them. Details may be embellished, connections invented, and moments from different periods brought together in a single composition. Past and present coexist, creating dreamlike scenes that reflect the way memory often works—not as a straight line, but as something that folds, overlaps, disappears, and unexpectedly returns. Among the recurring figures are cats, which appear throughout the exhibition and add moments of playfulness and humor to McCaffrey’s thoughtful exploration of family and memory. The act of painting itself also becomes part of this conversation about time. While a painting preserves a subject in a seemingly still moment, its creation unfolds over hours, days, or longer. Each work becomes both an image of a remembered experience and a record of the time McCaffrey spent revisiting, interpreting, and reconstructing it.
A nationally recognized contemporary painter, McCaffrey is known for richly layered figurative compositions that explore family, memory, and the passage of time. His work is intimate and personal, but the questions at the heart of Today/Tomorrow/Yesterday are universal: What do we choose to remember? What changes as time passes? And how do the stories we tell about the people we love become part of the way we understand our own lives? Today/Tomorrow/Yesterday: Michael McCaffrey is on view August 22–November 8, 2026, at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, Missouri. Financial assistance provided by the St. Joseph, Missouri Visitors Bureau and Missouri Arts Council.
