WASHINGTON, DC.- The American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center presents Ghost in the Machine, a new exhibition by Washington, DC artist Timothy Makepeace, on view June 13 through August 9, 2026. Curated by Michael O’Sullivan and Thomas Drymon, the exhibition is the culmination of nine years of sustained artistic inquiry into the James Webb Space Telescope — the most powerful infrared space observatory ever built.


Defocused Stars of Orion with JWST, 2025. Sumi ink, acrylic paint, on paper, 49” x 49”

In 2017, Makepeace was given rare access, along with a small group of artists selected nationwide, to make art about the telescope while it was still under construction at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Those encounters set in motion artistic inquiry and exploration that has occupied him ever since.


JWST - Aluminized Kapton Film on Spacecraft Bus v.4, 2023 Charcoal and pastel on paper, 49” x 49

“What started as an opportunity to be inspired by extraordinary engineering became something else entirely,” says Makepeace. “Nine years of focused work asking what it means to build a machine designed to see the beginning of time. The relationship between the physical and the ephemeral. The liminal zone between the tangible and the intangible. The finite reaching toward the infinite.”


JWST - Orbital Path Across the Sinusoidal Rake of the Stars v.1 - 370 days, 2023. Sumi ink, acrylic paint, on paper 49” x 49”

The exhibition draws on the philosophical concept of the “ghost in the machine” — the inextricable connection between body and mind, the physical and the ethereal — expanding the concept to encompass matter and space, the rational and the poetic, the mundane and the exquisite. The work draws on Constructivism and Precisionism — elevating engineered objects to geometric abstraction — to explore what transcendence looks like when it is man-made rather than natural.


Mid-Infrared Instrument Light Path, 2025 Sumi ink, acrylic paint, on paper, 49” x 49”

“In a wide-ranging career, it’s not a single look that he is after, but rather a singular idea,” write curators Michael O’Sullivan and Thomas Drymon. “His pursuit is of something ineffable: an intangible, even unnameable transcendence that is not to be found in the grand, untamed landscapes that once captivated Albert Bierstadt and his peers but in what man has built. It is man who is Makepeace’s true subject. And that’s a transcendent enough idea.”


MIRI Light Path Jumbo Composite Install, 2026. Sumi ink, acrylic paint, on paper, 130” x 130”

An earlier body of this JWST-inspired work was presented in a solo exhibition, Reflections on a Tool of Observation, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, in 2021–22. Ghost in the Machine is the culmination of everything that has followed.


NIRSpec Light Path v.2, 2026. Sumi ink, acrylic paint, on paper, 49” x 49”


Polar Star Trails and Mirror with JWST Orbital Path v.1, 2024 Sumi ink, acrylic paint, on paper, 49” x 49”.


Ray Tracing - MIRI onboard JWST, 2025. Gouache, sumi ink, acrylic paint, on paper, 106” x 71”