On Charles Ross’s Star Axis and Entering the Earth to Reach the Stars

After more than five decades, Charles Ross is nearly ready to unveil his magnum opus, Star Axis, a monumental sculpture envisioned as a naked-eye observatory that brings the movements of the cosmos to human scale. Although the work occupies an almost mythic place in the Land Art canon, few have ever seen Star Axis. I visited it as part of the press trip for Site Santa Fe’s annual benefit last month and was told we were the second group of journalists brought there, as the museum had forged a trusting relationship with Ross. Previously, only donors who had donated  $10,000 or more, or select curators, had been invited to make the pilgrimage.

When I first got the invitation, I found out that almost no one, including my ‘art world friends’, knew about Star Axis. It was one of those works that had lived in my imagination but that I had only seen the work in photographs by Gianfranco Gorgoni, captured in the 1970s. Ross himself has been so quiet about the project over the years that even people in the nearby area hardly know about it. Star Axis is situated within a remote landscape near Las Vegas, New Mexico, around 105 kilometres from Santa Fe, and is encircled by what was once a 62,000 acre cattle ranch that has since been converted to an exotic hunting lodge. 

Ross spent around four years in the mid-1960s scouring the Southwest in a helicopter, with a pilot who had worked for Michael Heizer, to find a site for Star Axis. He was unsuccessful. But while driving through backroads in New Mexico, he found a region of sprawling mesas overlooking the plains and knew it was the right place. As we approached Star Axis, he recalled that he couldn’t quite express the “quality of feeling” that he was looking for from an aerial view. “Once I was here, I realised this is a place where your feet are planted on the ground and your head is in the space of the stars,” he said.

Ross first envisioned Star Axis as a staircase on the edge of a mesa, where a metal hoop would frame the star Polaris and the precession of the equinoxes: the roughly 26,000-year cycle in which the Earth’s rotational axis traces a circle through space, causing the north celestial pole to shift over millennia. During one of his visits to the area, Ross was stopped by a cowboy on horseback, the son of W.O. Culbertson Jr., who owned the land and was a prominent cattle rancher, banker and former state representative. Rather than ask Ross to leave, the cowboy was intrigued by Ross’s vision and put him in touch with his father, who said the project was interesting and asked Ross to describe Star Axis in three minutes or less.

Over the phone, Ross gave Culbertson a description of his idea and said that he needed a mesa and an area totaling around 2.6 sq. km. Culbertson then told him to drive around the ranch and choose a space. When Ross asked whether Culbertson wanted to meet him first, Culbertson responded: “I don’t have to. I love the idea.” Culbertson agreed to lease Ross a 400-acre parcel on the ranch and Ross spent months surveying the area before he found the site where Star Axis is today. He and Culbertson became great friends, stargazing together frequently over the years.

As Ross conceived the foundation for Star Axis, he recalls that he woke up every morning with this mantra in his head: “You have to enter the earth to reach the stars. You have to enter the earth to reach the stars.” He said: “I realised I was going to have to move the staircase inside the mountain to get this voice to turn off, which it did as soon as I committed. That added three or four million dollars to the cost and around fifteen years – maybe a little more – to the construction.”

Star Axis broke ground in 1976. The pyramidal sculpture is primarily built from earth, concrete, steel and granite. It is made entirely of astronomical calculations. The structure’s principal angles correspond to the summer and winter solstices, while its chambers, tunnels and stairways are aligned to reveal the Earth’s relationship to the stars over vast time. You stand on steps engraved with different years and can watch Polaris trace the rim of its aperture. It approaches and recedes from the celestial pole. The central date, 2100, marks the period when Polaris will come closest to the north celestial pole – the nearest any North Star comes during the cycle, which is an astronomical moment that Ross used as the anchor for a work.

Ross cycled through many designs for Star Axis before he found one that felt “most natural for the human body to walk through,” he said. It is intended that, if anyone looked up the stairs, whether or not they knew about art or Star Axis, they would know instantly that this has something to do with the stars. The acoustics inside are cacophonous. His wife, the artist Jill O’Bryan, noted that their dream is to have Yo-Yo Ma perform there. It is a meditative space. Ross said he has slept there several times over the years.

During the walkthrough, someone in the group asked whether Ross, who is eighty-eight-years-old, had ever written down a plan for finishing Star Axis in case he died before the work was completed. He pointed to his head and said: “No. All here.” I asked Ross how he knew that Star Axis was done, after having worked on it for so many years. “Well, it’s not quite done,” he said. “There’s always more to do. You know it’s done when there’s nothing left to do.”

On an adjacent mesa lies the couple’s home and studio, made from two conjoined trailers, where they split their time between the desert and New York. We were served lunch there, consisting of salad, red grapes and quiche. There were two dogs, one named Pi (short for 3.14159) that hovered beneath the tablecloth throughout, and another named Tika, who was less food-motivated. As some of the table shifted the conversation to Wimbledon, we refocused on art. Ross shared that his interest in astronomy began in 1965, when the vision of a prism came to him in a dream. He then placed a similar prism on a window and began recording how light passed through it to create a spectrum. 

When Ross was building his first large-scale prism, he said he had mistakenly consulted a mechanical engineer instead of a hydraulic engineer for guidance on how to build a polyhedron filled with water. As he built it, the prism exploded, hitting him in the chest and throwing him across the room. Michael Heizer, who rented the studio below him and was painting downstairs, suddenly saw a sheet of water engulf his painting from the ground above. Heizer came running upstairs and asked: “Am I tripping? Did I take something?” He saw Ross lying on the floor and they both laughed. Heizer’s own magnum opus, City (1970-2022) in the Nevada desert, was similarly completed in 2022 after five decades of work. Ross said that he’s never been to City and that Heizer has never been to Star Axis and likely never will, as Heizer’s health has sadly deteriorated in recent years.

After lunch, we visited the Dwan Light Sanctuary at the United World College–USA, a building  with 24 prisms set into skylights and two axes that Ross completed in 1996 for the gallerist Virginia Dwan, the foremost champion of Land Art. Ross recalled that, when he was first looking for a gallery in New York, Sol LeWitt told him: “Why don’t you talk to Virginia Dwan? I think she has a collection of crystals. Maybe she’ll be interested in the prisms.” And when he visited the gallery, Dwan told him: “You’re not an artist? Go away. The gallery’s full for the next three years. I can’t look at any more art.” He replied: “But I make large transparent prisms.” Dwan came to his studio the next day and bought a work. Ross then had three shows at the gallery and maintained a lifelong relationship with Dwan.

During our visit, Ross asked the group not to take pictures of Star Axis, presumably because The New York Times had the exclusive on the Star Axis story. The opening date of the work remains nebulous as “sometime next year.” Another writer on the trip noted in a subsequently-formed group chat that pictures of Star Axis were posted on Instagram by another writer, who was not on our trip. I said that our non-disclosure agreement was canceled. When Star Axis does open, Ross wants people to experience the work, think about it, then write down their thoughts in a notebook the next day. The link to the stars is not an art destination for social media. 

Ross plans to donate Star Axis to an institution, although he has not announced which one. The Land Light Foundation, the nonprofit he and O’Bryan founded to raise funds to complete Star Axis and open it to the public, is looking to find an institutional partner. It is also fundraising for an additional $600,000 to fully finish the construction, which lacks ADA-compliant elements like railings and other features in some spaces. Beginning next year, the foundation is looking to raise $5m for a reserve to help operations; it has raised $2.5m so far, and another donor has pledged $1m.

As we concluded our walkthrough with Ross, he said that the fact Star Axis exists is a miracle. “I’m not sure you could do something like that today,” he said. “Someone gave me the land because he liked the idea. It’s incredible that someone could be that open-minded. The childlike quality of Star Axis is that it almost knows what it wants, and it keeps creating situations where it gets what it needs.”