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

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Charles Ross's New Mexico land art project is finally nearing completion after 50 years

Half a century after he first secured a mesa in New Mexico, Charles Ross's most ambitious work is approaching public opening. Star Axis, the Philadelphia-born artist's vast earthwork and celestial observatory, has been in development since 1975 and is now entering its final phase, according to the Land Light Foundation, which is overseeing the project's completion.

Ross, born in 1937, came to the work through an unusual route. As a mathematics student at UC Berkeley, he took a sculpture class to satisfy an elective requirement, then committed himself to art. By 1962, he had earned an MA in sculpture. A decade later, after a chance encounter with a ranching family in New Mexico, he found the land that would become the site of Star Axis.

The project was conceived to make precession - the slow wobble of Earth's axis under the gravitational pull of the sun and moon - perceptible at human scale. Ross has described the experience as something that cannot be fully grasped intellectually alone. The work is meant to be entered, walked through, and physically felt.

Star Axis is organized around five major components: Star Tunnel, Solar Pyramid, Shadow Field, the Equatorial Chamber, and the Hour Chamber. Together, they form a unified structure that sits between sculpture, observatory, and landscape intervention. The project has often been discussed alongside the land art of Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, whose works in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped define the field. Ross's ambition, however, has always been more explicitly astronomical.

This spring, the Land Light Foundation launched a $5 million fundraising goal to support the final year of construction and prepare the work for public access. The foundation is also seeking an institutional partner to own, maintain, and operate Star Axis, in a structure comparable to Dia's stewardship of The Lightning Field.

Ross now lives in New York with his wife, the artist Jill O'Bryan. For a project that began in the middle of nowhere in 1975, the long wait has become part of its meaning: a work built to measure time is finally arriving at the scale of public experience.

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