Charles Ross (born 1937) is an American contemporary artist known for work centered on natural light, time and planetary motion.McEvilley, Thomas. "Charles Ross: Following the North Star," Charles Ross: The Substance of Light, Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, 2012. Retrieved January 27, 2022.Kuspit, Donald. "Charles Ross: Light's Measure," Art in America, March–April 1978, p. 96–9.Karlin, Susan. "A Sculptor Works Up an Exposé of the Stars' Secrets," The New York Times, November 3, 2002. Retrieved February 2, 2022. His practice spans several art modalities and includes large-scale prism and solar spectrum installations, "solar burns" created by focusing sunlight through lenses, paintings made with dynamite and powdered pigment, and Star Axis, an earthwork built to observe the stars.Beachy-Quick, Dan. "Charles Ross, Rule Gallery," Artforum, December 2020. Retrieved January 28, 2022.Hass, Nancy. "What Happens When a Single Art Project Becomes a Decades-Long Obsession?," The New York Times, September 18, 2018. Retrieved January 27, 2022.Adlmann, Jan Ernst. "Charles Ross," Art in America, October 5, 2012. Retrieved January 28, 2022.Larson, Kay. " New Landscapes In Art," The New York Times, May 13, 1979. Retrieved January 27, 2022. Ross emerged in the mid-1960s at the advent of minimalism, and is considered a forerunner of "prism art"—a sub-tradition within that movement—as well as one of the major figures of land art.Hass, Nancy. "What Happens When a Single Art Project Becomes a Decades-Long Obsession?," The New York Times, September 18, 2018. Retrieved January 27, 2022. His work employs geometry, seriality, refined forms and surfaces, and scientific concepts in order to reveal optical, astronomical and perceptual phenomena.Hass, Nancy. "A Land Art Pioneer’s Adventures in Time and Space," The New York Times, July 21, 2020. Retrieved January 27, 2022.Brenson, Michael. "The Landscape Maintains Its Hold on American Artists," The New York Times, March 9, 1986. Retrieved January 28, 2022. Artforum critic Dan Beachy-Quick wrote that "math as a manifestation of fundamental cosmic laws—elegance, order, beauty—is a principle undergirding Ross’s work … [he] becomes a maker-medium of a kind, constructing various methods for sun and star to create the art itself."Beachy-Quick, Dan. "Cosmic Dancer: Dan Beachy-Quick on Charles Ross’s Star Axis," Artforum, October 28, 2021. Retrieved June 10, 2022.
Ross has exhibited at venues including the Museum of Modern Art,Museum of Modern Art. Charles Ross, Artists. Retrieved June 10, 2022. PS1, Dwan Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,Nisbet, James. "Ends of the Earth," Artforum, 2012. Retrieved June 10, 2022. and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. "Charles Ross: The Substance of Light," Exhibitions. Retrieved June 10, 2022. His artworks are collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other institutions.Whitney Museum of American Art Charles Ross, Cube Stack, Works. Retrieved February 2, 2022.Centre Pompidou. Charles Ross, Sunlight Dispersion, Resources. Retrieved February 2, 2022.Ottmann, Klaus (et al). Charles Ross: The Substance of Light, Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, 2012. Retrieved January 27, 2022. In 2011, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow.Artforum. "2011 Guggenheim Fellows Announced," News, April 7, 2011. Retrieved February 2, 2022. He lives and works in SoHo, Manhattan and New Mexico with his wife, painter Jill O'Bryan.
Background Ross was born December 17, 1937, in Philadelphia and grew up in the nearby suburb of Glenside.Malle, Loic. "Charles Ross," Charles Ross: The Substance of Light, (Klaus Ottman, et al), Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, 2012. Retrieved January 27, 2022. He studied physics for two years at Penn State before transferring to the more liberal University of California, Berkeley in 1958. In 1960, he graduated with a BA in mathematics, but was already moving towards art after taking a sculpture course to fulfill a liberal-arts requirement; he was attracted to the medium as a means of making abstract ideas physical.Wasserman, Emily. "Richard Van Buren, David Novros, Charles Ross," Artforum, Summer 1968. Retrieved January 28, 2022.
After earning an MA in sculpture from Berkeley in 1962, he spent the early years of his career in New York, initially producing assemblage works concerned with balancing shape and form.Ottmann, Klaus. "Lightness of Being: The Art of Charles Ross," Charles Ross: The Substance of Light, Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, 2012. Retrieved January 27, 2022. He was one of the original artist residents to join the historically significant artist cooperative at 80 Wooster Street organized by Fluxus founding member George Maciunas; the cooperative has been credited by cultural observers with the development of Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood into an art-world hub.Kostelanetz, Richard. Soho: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony], United Kingdom: Routledge, 2003, p. 173. Retrieved June 10, 2022.Gordon, Amanda. "Loft Horizons," ARTnews, February 1, 2011. Retrieved February 8, 2022.Taylor, Candace. "New York Penthouse Asks $43 Million," The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2014. Retrieved June 8, 2022. After moving to San Francisco, Ross began his longstanding investigation of light in 1965, with the creation of large-scale prisms assembled in his warehouse studio.Danieli, Fidel A. "Two Showings of Younger Los Angeles Artists," Artforum, October 1966. Retrieved January 28, 2022.
He returned to New York in 1967 and began showing at the noted Dwan Gallery—prominent in both the minimalism and land-art movementsVogel, Carol. "Virginia Dwan’s Big Gift to the National Gallery," The New York Times, September 26, 2013. Retrieved January 28, 2022.Knight, Christopher. "Where yellow means go, and go now: LACMA’s standout show on ‘60s Dwan Gallery," Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2017. Retrieved February 2, 2022.—after being introduced to Virginia Dwan by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, whom critics cite as an influence in Ross's work. Ross showed there until 1971 when the gallery closed,Baker, Kenneth. "Charles Ross, Dwan Gallery," Artforum, March 1971. Retrieved January 28, 2022.National Gallery of Art. "Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971," Exhibitions. Retrieved February 2, 2022. and continued a professional relationship with Dwan that culminated in their joint 1996 project, the Dwan Light Sanctuary.Rizzo, Angie. "Holy Architecture for Earthly Devotion," Hyperallergic, January 28, 2020. Retrieved January 27, 2022.Eddy, Jordan. "Field Report: Las Vegas, NM," Southwest Contemporary, August 28, 2018. Retrieved January 27, 2022. In the early 1970s, he began showing at other galleries, including the John Weber Gallery in New York, and conceived his large-scale earthwork project, Star Axis, which is still under construction.Keeffe, Jeffrey. "Charles Ross, John Weber Gallery," Artforum, May 1979. Retrieved January 28, 2022.Needham, Alex. "Thunderbolts and time travel: my journey to the cosmic heart of land art," The Guardian, May 11, 2016. Retrieved February 2, 2022. At that time he also purchased a larger, top-floor studio on Wooster Street, where he made some of his first solar burns on the roof. In subsequent years, he has shown at Franklin Parrasch in New York and Parrasch Heijnen in Los Angeles.Campbell, Andy. "Charles Ross, Parrasch Heijnen Gallery," Artforum, 2017. Retrieved January 28, 2022.
Work Critics note in Ross's work a juxtaposition of aesthetic and conceptual appeal with the immediacy of natural forces that he records and displays. It has been described as a "cocktail of science and art," employing sculpture as an instrument for perception. Curator and writer Klaus Ottmann has written that all of Ross's work emanates from "an early and enduring excitement about geometry" and a "preoccupation with the substance of light, the existence of its physical, quantum, and metaphysical expressions." Ross's major bodies of work consist of prism sculptures, Solar Burns using focused sunlight, the earthwork Star Axis, solar spectrum installations, explosion works made with powdered pigments, and "Star Maps."
Early work and prism art Ross's early work varied in both focus and materials, and included sculpture, environments, and collaborations with the experimental Judson Dance Theater and choreographer Anna Halprin.Monte, James. "Charles Ross, Dilexi Gallery," Artforum, March 1965. Retrieved January 28, 2022.Museum of Modern Art. "Concert of Dance #13. 1963," Retrieved February 7, 2022. This work often showed an interest in process and motion—recurring themes in his art—as in Room Service (1963), a large, dynamic sculpture he created for a Judson Dance performance, which evolved in response to the movement of dancers.Carroll, Noël and Sally Banes. "Working and Dancing: A Response to Monroe Beardsley's 'What Is Going on in a Dance?'" Dance Research Journal, Autumn, 1982, p. 37–41. Retrieved June 8, 2022.
In 1965, after a detailed dream about building a prism, Ross made a complete break from his assemblage work. He began using acrylic to construct transparent geometric forms of varying shapes filled with liquid that functioned as prisms—his first foray into the light-themed work that would be the enduring focus of his career. He showed prism works in solo exhibitions at Dilexi Gallery (1965, San Francisco), Park Place Gallery (1966, New York), and Dwan Gallery (1968, 1969, 1971).Pincus-Witten, Robert. "Charles Ross, Dwan Gallery" Artforum, May 1969. Retrieved January 28, 2022.Weller, A. H. "Film: Eye of the Artist," The New York Times, April 29, 1974. Retrieved January 28, 2022. His early prisms were modestly scaled, minimal variations on cubes that functioned as geometric objects and perceptual vessels, displaying different views and perspectives within their shapes. The subsequent "Prism Walls" (tall prism columns set side-by-side with space between them) and Coffin (1968)—a large pentagonal, human-sized piece—were increasingly complex in terms of their fragmentation and dislocation of perspectives. A 2020 Artforum review of the early prism works described them as offering a threshold into "a mode of contemplation that is exceedingly elemental, nearly imperceptible … Ross's humble objects are an art of philosophic passivity. They let enter into them the forces that enter us all [and] give us a glimpse of the cosmic realities that more truly house our lives."
In his later work with prisms, Ross became interested in them as transmitters of light rather than objects. These works spread white light into the solar spectrum, creating a dynamic interaction between the prisms, the sun's movement across the sky, and viewers, notably in the Dwan Light Sanctuary (1996). The sanctuary is a structural artwork located in Montezuma, New Mexico, on the campus of the United World College, and a collaboration with Virginia Dwan and architect Laban Wingert. The circular structure has an open interior and a ceiling that is twenty-three feet in height. It includes design elements that echo traditional religious architecture, but was conceived by Dwan as a secular space and contains no specific symbology. Ross contributed solar spectrum artwork in the form of 24 enormous prisms strategically placed in the structure's apses and skylights, as well as astronomical design elements such as the building's orientation. Aligned with the sun to project different seasonal spectrum events and to evolve throughout the day with the earth's turning, the prisms cast immense rainbows in slashing patterns and shades that move around the room's curved plaster walls.
Solar Burns