Artist Charles Ross Spent 50 Years Trying to Bring the Stars Down to Earth. At 88, Has He Done It?

Portrait of an older man with short gray hair standing with arms crossed, illuminated by a band of rainbow light projected across a neutral background. — The artist Charles Ross, 2026.

Charles Ross was driving through the New Mexico desert in 1975 when a cowboy rode up to him and changed the course of his life.

The artist, then in his mid-30s, had already earned attention for his work in large-scale prisms. At this point, Star Axis was just a vision in Ross’s head, a large naked-eye observatory, focused on our North Star, Polaris. He pictured it in dreams. He’d already spent four years crisscrossing the desert searching for the right location to bring it to life.

“I drove all over the southwest every summer for three or four months,” Ross said. “I looked at all of Nevada, Arizona, Utah, West Texas, southern Colorado, all of New Mexico, and a little bit of Idaho.” But he kept returning to the mesas of New Mexico. “I knew the land needed to have a certain kind of feeling,” he said. On this one fateful trip, he pulled his car off the road and parked, knowing he was close to what he was seeking.

“On top of the mesa, you feel like your feet are planted on the ground, your head is in the space of the stars, and the horizon is at midsection,” said Ross. “I had this feeling of standing at the boundary between the earth and the sky.” Ross was standing, looking up at the land, when the cowboy approached him on horseback.

“He looked like the Marlboro man,” recalled Ross, still slightly incredulous a half century later. “He was concerned that I knew how to park in grasslands.” Mufflers can start grass fires, so cars should always be parked over a rock. Ross had parked correctly. “I told him about the project I had in mind. This is 1975 in the middle of nowhere,” said Ross, “But he said to me, ‘That sounds like just the sort of thing my dad would be interested in. Give him a call.’” The cowboy handed a mystified Ross a business card. His name was Miles Culbertson, and his father was W.O. Culbertson, Jr, a titanic figure in New Mexico, a prominent rancher who had run for governor. He owned more land than Ross could dream of.

Ross called him from a payphone the next morning. “He picked up and said, ‘My son told me about it. Sounds real interesting. I’m going to a banking meeting. The plane’s waiting outside. Can you describe it in 3 minutes or less?’” Ross gave him his best elevator pitch. Culbertson asked Ross how much land he needed, which was about a square mile. “Well, hell, we got plenty of those. Drive around the ranch and pick one out,” he told him. Ross found his piece of land, up high on a mesa—an auspicious beginning.

Now, 50 years later, Ross’s life’s work, Star Axis, is finally nearing completion.

What is Star Axis?

Like many other artists of his generation, Ross felt pulled to the Southwest, beckoned by its sublime emptiness. In 1969, his friend Michael Heizer had dug Double Negative out of the red rock of the Nevada desert. Robert Smithson followed with Spiral Jetty in 1970.

But what Ross had in mind was not quite Land Art. Ross, who was born in Philadelphia in 1937, had become increasingly fascinated by planetary movement. With Star Axis, he wanted to make the slow celestial shift known as “precession” perceptible on a human scale.

Charles Ross, Star Axis, Solar Pyramid and Shadow Field. © Charles Ross 2025.

Precession is one of Earth’s three planetary movements, alongside rotation—the daily turn—and revolution, the year-long orbit around the sun. Under the gravitational pull of the sun and moon, the planet’s axis wobbles like a top, completing a vast cycle every 26,000 years. As it does, its alignment with the North Star slowly shifts: Polaris holds that position now, but Vega will eventually take its place.

“When I realized that 26,000-year star cycle pulses in the human visual field, it was not enough to know about it in my head. I want to see what it feels like to go through, stand in it,” Ross told me recently at his Wooster Street loft, where he lives with his wife, the artist Jill O’Bryan.

Star Axis is part observatory and part earthwork. It is a more expansive project than Ross had originally imagined, and encompasses five major components in a unified structure: Star Tunnel, Solar Pyramid, Shadow Field, the Equatorial Chamber, and the Hour Chamber.

Earlier this spring, the non-profit Land Light Foundation, set up to steward the completion of Star Axis under the leadership of CEO Jamie Clements, kicked off a fundraising goal of $5 million for the final year of construction and to help prepare for its public opening. The foundation is also working to secure an institutional partner to own, maintain, and operate the artwork (much in the way Dia stewards The Lightning Field). Star Axis plans to open to the public within the next few years.

An Accidental Artist

Charles Ross discovered his passion for art almost by mistake. In 1960, as a young mathematics major at UC Berkeley, he needed an elective credit to graduate. Somewhat begrudgingly, he enrolled in a sculpture studio course. It would change the path of his life; Ross threw himself into sculpture with full commitment. By 1962, he had earned an MA in sculpture at Berkeley.

Early in his career, Ross made welded steel and latticework sculptures, exploring his interest in transparency. During these years, he often collaborated with Judson Dance Theater in Greenwich Village to create stage sets, props, and moving scaffolding. A creative breakthrough came Thanksgiving weekend 1965.

“I get a lot from dreams,” he said. “I saw these drawings of prisms in my peripheral vision. I thought I should pay attention.” He set to work. These forays into building prisms were true experiments. While living and working in San Francisco, in a studio just above Heizer’s, one of his early prisms exploded, the acrylic sheets buckling, sending a wall of water through a crack in the floor, into Heizer’s studio.

“He came running up and said, ‘Look at me, am I tripping? A sheet of water just fell between me and my painting,” said Ross. “We had a good laugh because I was still lying on the floor. The explosion had thrown me across the room.”

In 1966, Ross opened “Lenses & Prisms” at the New York collaborative gallery Park Place. Soon after, Sol Lewitt suggested he reach out to the influential gallerist Virginia Dwan; he knew she had a big collection of crystals and thought the new work might appeal to her. During Dwan’s first studio visit, she bought a prism and would become one of the great champions of Ross’s career. That prism remained in her living room at the Dakota until her death in 2022.

By the 1970s, Dwan had closed her galleries and was devoting herself to Land Art. She provided integral financial support for both Spiral Jetty and Double Negative, as well as to Star Axis. Another of Ross’s major projects, Dwan Light Sanctuary, was commissioned by the patron in 1996. It lives not far from Star Axis at the United World College in Montezuma, New Mexico. For this project, Ross created two dozen large-scale prisms that reflect the solar spectrum, permanently installed in the structure built by architect Laban Wingert.

Charles Ross, Dwan Light Sanctuary. Courtesy of the artist.

“She wanted to build a place for meditation, quiet contemplation, based on the number 12,” Ross explained. “She was fascinated by the number 12—12 saints, 12 months, 12 constellations of the zodiac, 12 inches. She had a mystical part of her persona.”

Prisms never left Ross’s practice. The installation Spectrum 14 is on view in the rotunda of the Getty Center in Malibu through November. The work, which includes a calibrated array of prisms, was commissioned for “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light,” an exhibition focused on the intersection of optics, geometry, astronomy, and religion in the Middle Ages.

The installation Spectrum 14 by artist Charles Ross is on view at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 2026. Courtesy of the artist.

Spectrum 14 is complemented by centuries-old astrolabes, tools used to calculate time, latitude, and to map star positions during the Middle Ages. For people today, who may never think of a connection to the sun and stars, Spectrum 14 brings them into the visual realm with rainbows refracted by these prisms, which move across the rotunda floor through a day and year.

“If you slow yourself down, these cosmic changes are just at the threshold of human perception. You can actually see the movement,” said Glenn Phillips, chief curator at the Getty, “A lot of the profundity of the experience is realizing you’ve made a physical connection.”

Charles Ross, Spectrum Chamber (2018). Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart, Tasmania. Commissioned by David Walsh. Architect: Nanda Katsalidis. Photo: Charles Ross. © 2026 Charles Ross / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Ross, in Phillips’s estimation, belongs to a lineage of artists attuned to science. Precession was identified in the Middle Ages, when astronomers realized that ancient celestial measurements no longer matched the night sky. “They had so much faith in their predecessors’ observations that they realized our entire planet is moving,” Phillips said. Ross’s work becomes another link in that chain.

Time as Medium

Over the past 50 years, Charles Ross has kept a decidedly low profile. Even many Land Art enthusiasts are unaware of Star Axis and the monumental commitment it has taken to bring it to life.

For decades, Ross and O’Bryan have spent spring to late fall living in an off-the-grid house made from two adjoining trailers, located on a mesa adjacent to Star Axis. They live in almost monastic devotion to the work at hand, and return to their Soho loft only when winters become too cold for construction to continue.

Ross’s supporters, however, feel a profound connection to Star Axis because of the sheer force of will it has taken to bring it to life. “Charles by his nature is not a publicity-seeker,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. “He has spent over 50 years working with diligence and determination on a mesa in New Mexico (after all, the Sistine Chapel ceiling only took Michelangelo about four years).”

This summer, the NGA will be screening Charles Ross: Where the Earth Meets the Sky, a film about Star Axis, as part of a series exploring how artists across America have been inspired by their communities and the places they call home. “Even leaving aside the sculpture for a moment, I am humbled by the moral beauty of his complete commitment, at great personal sacrifice, to seeing this extraordinary artwork’s completion,” said Feldman.

Charles Ross, Star Axis, Star Tunnel © Charles Ross, 2025.

Louis Grachos, director of Site Santa Fe, has been following the construction of Star Axis since the 1990s. “This is a generation of artists who explored and used the land, the sky, and the ethereal in their work. It is very much in the realm of artists such as Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Donald Judd, and the Chinati Foundation,” said Grachos. “I see it as adding meaningfully to what is often referred to as the Western projects.”

A Blip in the Narrative

Time, both celestial and personal, is at the crux of the work. Sitting atop an undisclosed mesa, Star Axis is made of quartzite granite, sandstone, stainless steel, and concrete.

Ancient origins anchor the work. “In 1971, I read Peter Tompkin’s book, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, which has all the math in it about how the pyramids were done,” Ross told me. “I was drawing that out, I ran into some star alignments in the pyramids that suggested precession, which is what Star Axis is all about.”

The central component of Star Axis is Star Tunnel, an 11-story stairway of 147 steps, aligned exactly parallel to the Earth’s axis. At the top of this staircase is an aperture pointed toward Polaris. As one ascends the staircase, more of the sky becomes visible, corresponding to a different point in the 26,000-year cycle of precession. Woodruff T. Sullivan, III, and Mallory Thorp, astronomers at the University of Washington, Seattle, dated the stairs from 11,000 B.C. to 15,000 A.D.

The smallest orbit of Polaris, viewed from the bottom stair in 2100 AD, is about the size of a dime held at arm’s length, almost exactly oriented to the Earth’s axis. The view from the top stair, marking the extremes of the largest orbit of Polaris, in 11,000 BC and 15,000 AD, encompasses an entire field of vision.

Charles Ross, Star Axis, looking south. © Charles Ross, 2025.

“Time becomes space and space becomes time,” Ross said. “You can see Polaris as Homer would have seen it, or Cleopatra, or now in the present.”

The structure of Star Axis also includes the Solar Pyramid, a 55-foot-high pink granite tetrahedron whose shape was determined by the summer and winter solstices, and acts as a giant sundial. The Solar Pyramid looks out over the Shadow Field, a bowtie-shaped field whose shape is based on all the Solar Pyramid’s daily shadows over the course of the year.

At the base of the Star Tunnel is the Equatorial Chamber, which aligns with the sun’s path on the equinox. Finally, the Hour Chamber is a sanctuary-like space that frames the movement of the stars over the course of an hour. The energies of these spaces Ross takes seriously and range from “complete stillness” of the Hour Chamber to the “anti-Feng Shui” of Star Tunnel, where “Earth’s energy is shooting right through the space.”

Star Axis is meant to be experienced both during the day and night. When it opens, small groups of visitors, by reservation only, will be brought to Star Axis at midday. Guests will then spend the night at Element House, a sustainable guest house on the property that was commissioned and built by the Museum of Outdoor Arts. At night, guests will have the chance to return to Star Axis and experience the work under a blanket of stars.

Cosmic Continuum

Over the decades, Star Axis has evolved intuitively. “When Star Axis started, it was going to be just a staircase on the side of the mesa loop at the top that would frame the pole star,” Ross said, “Then, every morning for 30 consecutive days, I woke up with this mantra saying, ‘You have to enter the earth to reach the stars.’ I realized it meant we were going to have to pull the staircase inside the mountain. That added $3 million to the cost of the project and about 15 years.”

To date, Star Axis has cost upwards of $10 million and has been funded through donations, grants, the sale of Ross’s studio works, and the sale of a segment of his Wooster Street property.

The artist, now 88, remains clear-eyed and plainspoken, but has something of a mystic aura about him. Even now, asked if there are documents in place to complete Star Axis, Ross taps his head, as though to say: “It’s all in my mind.”

While it is natural to draw comparisons between Ross and two of the last living titans of his era, James Turrell and Heizer, Ross stands apart in that he’s come this far without backing from mega galleries. He’s represented by the Franklin Parrasch Gallery in New York and Parrasch Heijnen in Los Angeles. Turrell, who has spent decades creating Roden Crater, is backed by a trio of mega galleries—Pace Gallery, Gagosian, and Almine Rech. Heizer completed the monumental City in 2022 in the Nevada desert, only after joining Gagosian in 2013.

Michael Govan, director of LAMCA, who is on the board of the Land Light Foundation, sees Ross as distinct from their concerns as well. “Charles is really tuned into time,” said Govan, during a recent phone conversation. “Star Axis is an index to the moving sky. In a way, as you come up the stairs, you are moving back in time.”

But while many are wowed by the 50 years Ross has spent creating Star Axis, Govan sees it differently. “Whether it’s the Watts Towers or Michael Heizer’s City… I’ve been working on this one museum building for 20 years,” said Govan, “Time flies. Fifty years is a speck of time.”

When the dust settles, Star Axis gets beyond that, he thinks. “What’s interesting about this work is a strange historical dimension,” he said.

Closer to the Cosmos

I visited Star Axis this past winter and, approaching the work, the only way possible, on a bumpy, unpaved road, I thought it seemed to camouflage itself into the landscape. Then, at not too far a distance, I could make out a pyramidal form looming above me and gleaming in the midday sun.

There is something deeply corporeal about the work that reaches beyond the conceptual and intellectual. When I ascended the 147 steps of the Star Tunnel in the pitch-black New Mexico night, I became acutely aware of my body, its strength, its weaknesses, and the strangeness and magnificence of perception at all. As the single pulsing light of Polaris guided me, pulled me, up the unseeable steps, alone, I felt the frightening and thrilling experience of complete surrender. Walking up the steps, my heart racing in moments, I thought more than once of T.S. Eliot’s famous lines, “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.” Was I ascending or descending toward the stars? Moving forward or backwards, toward the past or the future? It felt like both. It felt like the great cosmic dance, and remembering, for some minutes, that I was in it.

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