Alumni News

by April White

In 2017, Tim Makepeace ’77 fell in love. The artist remembers the moment as “captivating” and “amazing.” “I thought, ‘I will always have this connection.’”

Tim was standing, looking into a clean room at the Goddard Space Flight Center in western Maryland, face to face with the gold-coated, two-story-high mirror array of the James Webb Space Telescope. “I was 20 feet away from this engineering marvel that would soon be a million miles from Earth for an eternity.” 

NASA had invited Tim and a cohort of other artists to find inspiration in the world’s largest space telescope before it was launched into orbit around the sun in 2021. In some ways, the Washington, DC-based artist and the cutting-edge scientific instrument were an odd pair. Tim’s work often focused on the past, not the future. He was drawn to the physical remnants of aging technology, photographing power plants, water towers, and refineries for a series he called “Industrial Sentinels” and forming sculptures from steel and concrete, the materials that shaped the 20th century. But at the NASA facility, Tim saw the same things that attracted him to these relics—evidence of bold progress, the artistry of geometry, and the undeniable fingerprints of humanity. The telescope has been his muse ever since.

Tim has almost always considered himself to be an artist. “I’m a builder by nature, and my mother was an artist, and my father was an art appreciator,” he says. Those influences led him into a photography class at The Potomac School and then further study at the Smithsonian Institution. He later focused on sculpture at the Corcoran School of Art, and received a degree in Fine Art from Cornell University. Those two art forms slowly blended for Tim. His photographs became larger and more dimensional, and his sculptures grew smaller and flatter. About a decade ago, disheartened by the ubiquity of photography in the smartphone era, Tim began to recreate his photos by hand. “I’m still a photographer and a sculptor at heart,” Tim says of the evolution. “But now I make drawings of sculptural things.”

The first pieces to come out of his introduction to the Webb telescope began as photographs of the object itself, composed with an eye toward geometry and reflection. Tim then spent months painstakingly translating the digital images using charcoal and pastels on paper. The results are both exact and something far more human. “By the time you end up with this thing that is seemingly photorealistic, it’s really an interpretation,” Tim says. “If I went and drew that again tomorrow, it would be different.”

Tim completed the works for a 2019 exhibition at the Goddard Space Flight Center, but he wasn’t finished with his subject yet. In 2021, he mounted a solo show, “Reflections on a Tool of Observation,” at the National Academy of Sciences, which included a series of ink-and-acrylic paintings that considered one of the Webb’s scientific purposes. Using a decade of data collected by earth-bound telescopes, Tim mapped the trajectories of the stars surrounding the black hole at the center of the Milky Way—one of the things the Webb is observing today.
“Every time I think, ‘Well, I've done it all,’ I think, ‘Oh, what about this? That's another thing I could think about,’” Tim says, gesturing around his studio in the basement of his home in Northwest Washington, DC. Tacked to the concrete wall is proof of his unexhausted curiosity. An enormous, unfinished black-and-white rendering of the Webb’s infrared camera and  spectrograph is crisscrossed with luminous streaks of cyan, magenta, yellow, and green, an attempt to relate in human terms the data the instrument will capture.

To paint the MIRI, as the infrared device is known in scientific circles, Tim had to figure out how it works. His artistic relationship with the Webb has been a crash course in topics from the electromagnetic spectrum to orbital mechanics. “It is important as an artist to understand what you're looking at,” he says. “It affects your perception of it and your ability to convey it.”

But as he prepares for a 2026 exhibition of his works on the telescope at the Katzen Arts Center at American University, Tim has also been thinking about our emotional connection to the heavens and the reasons people have looked for shapes and stories in the stars for millennia. Beside his current work in progress is another painting of stars streaking through a black night, an accurate-but-impossible view of what one would see if they spent a year in Tim’s backyard, staring, unblinking, at a cloudless night sky. Among the starlight is the far-away Webb. Tim traced its twisting oval orbit in blue paper. “I found this to be quite emotional. I call it a letter home. It’s like it’s sending back a few photons personally to me,” he says.

“I still have this connection.”

See more of Tim’s work on his website: tmakepeace.com

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