Charles Ross, “Mansions of the Zodiac”

by Ann Landi

Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico

Continues through September 7, 2025

Charles Ross, “Star Axis: Solar Pyramid,” a tetrahedron built to the angles of the sun at summer and winter solstices. All images courtesy of the artist. © Charles Ross / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Though never as prominent as contemporaries like James Turrell and Michael Heizer, Charles Ross has had a long and esteemed career originally as part of the late-1960s Land Art movement. Like both Heizer and Turrell, Ross has an immense ongoing project in the desert, known as “Star Axis.” It bears a resemblance, at least in photographs, to ancient Incan or Aztec monuments of unknown religious import. The New York Times has described the colossus, situated on 400 acres within a 76,000-acre cattle ranch in the New Mexico desert, as an “11-story naked-eye observatory made of sandstone, bronze, earth, granite and stainless steel …” Says The Santa Fe New Mexican, “[I]t is an earth star sculpture with angles determined by earth-to-star alignments so stars and other celestial phenomena can be experienced in human scale, no telescope necessary.”

Charles Ross, “Solar Spectrum, Dwan Light Sanctuary,” installation, Montezuma, New Mexico.

I have not seen “Star Axis,” but I have visited another massive work, “Dwan Light Sanctuary,” a temple-like building in Montezuma, NM, for which Ross created 24 enormous prisms in homage to the visionary art dealer Virginia Dwan, who died in 2022. I myself was seriously underwhelmed, but the kids in my entourage, striking yogic poses on the stone steps, were loving it.

Ross discovered a passion for making art while studying mathematics at UC Berkeley. His first foray into light-themed work that would become the ongoing focus of his career occurred when he began using acrylic to construct transparent geometric forms of varying shapes filled with liquid that functioned as prisms. He showed these at galleries in New York and California, including Dwan, through the late 1960s as they became increasingly more complex and ambitious.

Charles Ross, “Mansions of the Zodiac: Tau,” 1973-76/2012, acrylic paint and collage using bakelite powder xeroxes of Verenberg photographic star atlas images on canvas, 190 x 63 1/2”.

One of his works from that era, “Prism Column,” is present here, rather understated but gleaming sentinel that refracts and reflects the dark blue walls and wood floor of the gallery. Another of Ross’s early works screening just a few feet away, “Sunlight Dispersion” (1972), is a 16 mm film about 25 minutes in length. It consists entirely of a succession of looped time-lapse clips that show the solar spectrum moving through the artist’s studio. The video captures rainbow patterns on a table, floor, and different objects, sometimes suggesting an art-school still-life setup shot through a prism. This may have been radical in its day, but it now seems flat and anti-climactic compared with many video masterworks of the past 50 years.

Ross fares better in the large gallery where his “Mansions of the Zodiac” are displayed. These are twelve “Star Maps,” created between 1973 and ’76 and reworked in 2012, each measuring 109 by 63 1/2 inches. In each a notched elliptical shape is positioned against a dark ground. According to the museum’s text, they are “two-dimensional views of the sky overlaying the passage of time onto the spatial arrangement of stars. Ross’s maps employ mathematical precision akin to Renaissance perspective, blending mythology with technology to illustrate cosmic order.”  Maybe so but I didn’t know how to make sense of what look like splotches of blue-ish wash and faint diagrammatic lines perhaps alluding to the constellations.

Charles Ross, “Mansions of the Zodiac: Aries,” 1973-76/2012, acrylic paint and collage using bakelite powder xeroxes of Verenberg photographic star atlas images on canvas, 190 x 63 1/2”.

The most (literally) sensational piece here, “Point Source / Star Apace: Weave of Ages” (1975/86), is described as “mixed media on paper mounted on canvas, created with 428 photographs from the Falkau Star Atlas which covers the entire celestial sphere from pole to pole, the viewpoint is that of the observer at the center of the earth.” Never mind all the astrophysical data, I just grooved on the big, jagged shapes, reminiscent of the collages of Abstract Expressionist painter Conrad Marca-Relli.

It's clear that Ross is an exemplar of the Land Art movement, but this show is not smartly curated and too compacted to demonstrate clearly what his accomplishments and overall achievement have been. A smaller retrospective with more gallery space (of which there is plenty upstairs) might have steered us through the full arc of his career and thus offered more compelling evidence of his importance. This was a missed opportunity.

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Charles Ross, “Point Source / Star Apace: Weave of Ages,” 1975/86, mixed media on paper mounted on canvas, created with 428 photographs from the Falkau Star Atlas which covers the entire celestial sphere from pole to pole, the viewpoint is that of the observer at the center of the earth, 106 x 225”.

For more than 30 years Ann Landi has reported on the art world for ARTnews, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and magazines like Smithsonian and Art & Antiques. From 2016 till 2022, she published a website for artists called Vasari21, which has now been repurposed into a weekly Substack newsletter, Vasari21Redux.  She operated the Wright Contemporary in Taos, NM, from 2022 to 2024.