Prismatic Effect: A Conversation with Charles Ross

For the second “Rotunda Commission,” a series of art installations inspired by the Getty Museum’s collection, architecture, and site, American artist Charles Ross created a site-specific work centered on natural light, time, and planetary motion. Spectrum 14 is a calibrated array of prisms that casts luminous color across the Museum’s rotunda and evolves with the seasonal arc of the sun. In this conversation with curator Glenn Phillips, Ross talks about his storied career—from early collaborations with Judson Dance Theater, to engagements with the minimal and land art movements, to his decades-long work with light and prisms.

Charles Ross
Using sunlight and starlight as the source for his art, Charles Ross creates large-scale prisms to project solar spectrums into architectural spaces; focuses sunlight into powerful beams to create solar burn works; draws the quantum behavior of light with dynamite; and works with a variety of other media including photography and video. For the last 52 years Ross has been building the geometry of the stars into his site-specific earthwork, Star Axis, https://www.staraxis.org, now nearing completion in New Mexico.

This program was presented at the Getty Center and Online on Sunday, October 27, 2024, https://www.getty.edu/calendar/prisma..., and complements the PST ART exhibition "Charles Ross: Spectrum 14," https://www.getty.edu/exhibitions/cha....

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