TAOS, NM.- Harwood Museum of Art announced Charles Ross: Mansions of the Zodiac, an exhibition celebrating critical moments in Ross’s seven-decade career, which includes works that have never been exhibited. Emerging in the 1960s with the advent of minimalism and earthworks, Charles Ross is considered one of the preeminent figures of the land art movement. His work is an on-going conversation with sunlight, starlight, Earth’s movements, and time. Over his long career, Charles Ross has created large-scale prisms that project the solar spectrum into architectural spaces, focused sunlight into powerful beams to create solar burn works, drawn the quantum behavior of light with dynamite, and worked with a variety of other media including photography and video. This exhibition opens as Ross nears the completion of his earth/sky work, Star Axis, a monumental architectonic sculpture and naked eye observatory located on the eastern plains of New Mexico. Charles Ross: Mansions of the Zodiac opens March 15, 2025 and is on view through September 7, 2025 in the Harwood’s Brandenburg and Mandelman-Ribak galleries.


Experience the captivating intersection of art and science with Charles Ross. Click here to explore his groundbreaking work with light and prisms in this illuminating book.


“I wanted to show Charles Ross: Mansions of the Zodiac now because Ross's work is reaching a critical juncture, particularly as Star Axis nears completion,” says Nicole Dial-Kay, Curator of Exhibitions + Collections for the Harwood Museum of Art. “His exploration of light, time, and space feels especially relevant in today’s context, where our relationship with the natural world is increasingly under scrutiny. Charles Ross is a living legend in the art world. I have long admired his contributions to land art and minimalism. It is an honor and a privilege to present Mansions of the Zodiac, which has never been shown before. This exhibition allows the public to experience the full scope of Ross’s engagement with celestial phenomena and aligns perfectly with one of the Harwood Museum's goals to explore and present art that deeply engages with place, history, and the environment.”

The Harwood exhibition presents Prism Column (1966/2015), Sunlight Dispersion (1971), Mansions of the Zodiac (1976–78/2012), and Point Source / Star Space: Weave of Ages (1975/86). Each of these represents a facet of Ross's exploration of light, time, and space, offering viewers a comprehensive insight into his artistic journey.

Charles Ross (b. 1937, Philadelphia, PA) discovered his passion for making sculpture while studying mathematics at University of California, Berkeley, where he received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1960 and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture in 1962. His first solo sculpture exhibition was at Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco in 1961. Ross taught sculpture at UC Berkeley, Cornell University, the School of Visual Arts, and Lehman College, New York. In 1963, he received a year-long fellowship to make art in New York, working with the Judson Dancers to create theatrical performances. Returning to San Francisco, he collaborated with dancer Anna Halprin on “Parades and Changes.” While working out of a warehouse in San Francisco, Ross had a dream that changed the direction of his artistic practice. Soon after, he moved back to New York.

“In 1965, I was making lattice sculptures you could see through because I was interested in transparency. One night, around Thanksgiving, I dreamed engineering plans for how to build a very large prism. I soon cleared out the old sculpture in my studio and started building large prisms,” says Charles Ross. “At first, I was interested in how the prism forms were collecting images from the environment. Then I placed a horizontal stack of large prisms in a sunny window and made a film, Sunlight Dispersion, showing the carpet of solar spectrum moving and expanding through my studio. At this point my interest in the prism sculptures shifted from the prism as an object to the spectrum created by the prisms and how it covered all in its path with a solar radiance as it moved through the space, propelled by the turning of the earth.”

These early prisms established Charles Ross as a significant artist within both the minimalist and land art movements. In New York, Ross helped to establish the first artist cooperative building at 80 Wooster Street. Organized by George Maciunas in 1967, this artist co-op launched SoHo. Ross exhibited his work at Virginia Dwan’s New York gallery from 1967 through the gallery’s closure in 1971. Art patron Virginia Dwan (1931- 2022), who was a lifelong supporter of Ross’s work, also championed the work of Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and Sol LeWitt, among others.

The Harwood’s showing of Prism Column (1966/2015) exemplifies Ross’s early work, which emphasized the relativity of space and vision. As viewers moved around his prisms, the images inside shifted, offering a constantly changing perspective. These early experiments laid the groundwork for Ross's later explorations with solar spectrums, where prisms cast rainbows of light onto surrounding architecture.

Sunlight Dispersion (1971) was co-edited with Peter Campus. The film illustrates one of Ross’s earlier solar spectrums, transforming sunlight as it moves through his studio into a dynamic display of colors. “Sunlight Dispersion” has been held by Centre Pompidou since 1975 and is shown outside this Paris institution for the first time in the Harwood exhibition. The film highlights Ross's fascination with the temporal and spatial qualities of light, emphasizing the intrinsic connection between the sun’s path and the passage of time.

The twelve Mansions of the Zodiac star map paintings, each measuring 109 by 63.5 inches, were initially created between 1976 and 1978 and reworked in 2012. These have never been exhibited before. The star map paintings were created by transferring images from the Verenberg photographic star atlas onto painted canvas using a process that involves bakelite powder and Xerox copies. Mansions of the Zodiac meticulously charts the positions of stars within each zodiac sign and tracks the precession of the equinoxes. This celestial phenomenon takes approximately 26,000 years to complete and can be observed through the changing positions of the stars in relation to Earth. The exhibition also includes a large star map painting titled Point Source / Star Space: Weave of Ages (1975/86), depicting the motion of the sun through the stars for each of the twelve astrological ages. Ross’s immense star map paintings were shown in a joint exhibition at the John Weber Gallery and Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York and later at the Venice Biennale in 1986.

Ross began to work on the star maps in 1974, so this body of work overlaps with his early planning for Star Axis. Located an hour and a half’s drive from Santa Fe, Star Axis is Ross’s largest work and is expected to be completed in 2026. The granite and sandstone structure stands at eleven stories tall and 1/10th of a mile across and has five main components. The Star Tunnel is precisely aligned with Earth's axis so that the steps of a person walking through it mark layers of celestial time, corresponding to the 26,000-year cycle of precession that shifts Earth’s alignment with the stars. The Solar Pyramid marks the daily and seasonal movements of the sun across the Shadow Field. Inside the Hour Chamber, a visitor can watch how the stars change position during one hour of Earth's rotation, and the Equatorial Chamber frames the stars that travel directly above the equator.

“Star Axis brings star geometry down into physical form and human scale so you can walk through the work and experience how the star alignments fit you. It's a whole body experience of astronomical time and scale,” explains Ross.

The land art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s was a radical departure from traditional gallery-based art. It sought to bring art out of the confines of the museum and into the natural environment, using the land itself as both medium and canvas. Artists like Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, and Charles Ross engaged with vast, remote landscapes to create monumental works that often required collaboration with engineers and other specialists. Land art challenged conventional notions of art by integrating natural processes, time, and environmental forces, making the Earth itself a critical participant in the artistic process. The land arts movement has had a lasting impact on the way art is conceived, produced, and experienced, pushing the boundaries of artistic expression and engaging with ecological and environmental themes.

New Mexico's vast, open landscapes, dramatic skies, and unique light have long attracted artists seeking to explore the relationship between art and the natural world. The state became a critical site for the land art movement, with the expansive spaces necessary for large-scale projects like Charles Ross's Star Axis and Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field. The clear, dark skies of New Mexico also provide an ideal environment for astronomical observation, making it a fitting location for works that engage with celestial phenomena. The people of New Mexico’s intimate connection to the land have further inspired artists to explore themes of time, space, and human interaction with the natural environment, solidifying New Mexico's place as a central hub for land art.

Poet Dan Beachy-Quick offers a reflection on Charles Ross’s Star Axis in the October 2021 issue of ArtForum, noting its unique connection to cosmic realities:

“One is not awestruck by its sheer mass, but by the understanding—through the body before the mind—that it was constructed around those cosmic realities that exist beyond our perception and provide the fundamental laws by which we dwell in the world. It is a structure in heedful surrender to reality as it most truly is,” writes Beachy-Quick. “Its beauty, so unexpectedly, is one of utmost humility—a tool to teach us a lesson so simple that we are bewildered by the fact of it: that we are macro- and micro-, star and heart, sun and breath—another cosmic braid, an adornment to the whole.”

Charles Ross is represented by Franklin Parrasch Gallery and parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles. His works reside in the permanent collections of numerous institutions internationally including National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA), Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA), Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indianapolis, IN), Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Nelson Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO), New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe, NM), and The Penn Art Collection at University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA). Ross is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the 1999 Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Eugene V. and Clare Thaw Charitable Trust, Someland Foundation, and McCune Charitable Foundation, among others.


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