He’s the Last Great Land Artist You’ve Never Heard Of
Charles Ross spent 50 years building “Star Axis,” a naked-eye observatory in New Mexico. Now his masterwork is ready. How to share it with a changed world?
A time-lapse video of the stars appearing to circle Polaris, the North Star, as seen from Charles Ross’s “Star Axis,” a monumental sculpture in northeastern New Mexico. Credit...
Reporting from Anton Chico, N.M., and New York.
This spring, Charles Ross sat in his studio in SoHo, but his mind was elsewhere: a mesa in eastern New Mexico, where his life’s work, a monumental naked-eye earthwork called “Star Axis,” — part observatory and part pyramid — juts at the cosmos. “If you’re there in the winter when there’s a snowstorm, it’s like the sky is painting the earth white,” he said. “And the thunderstorms. And rainbows several times a week.”
Ross has a degree in math and a yen for physics. He says he can sense celestial alignments, and feel the difference between colors of light in a spectrum. When he needed a well dug for his desert home, he called a dowser.
The artist, 88, belongs to a generation of land artists who shed galleries and cities to work at a scale more common in ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica. In 1975, he had been crisscrossing the Southwest for four years, hunting for the perfect location for “Star Axis,” when a cowboy appeared and handed him a business card.
