The Art of Light: A Conversation with Charles Ross and James Meyer

Charles Ross, artist, and James Meyer, curator of art, 1945–1974, National Gallery of Art Using sunlight and starlight as the inspiration for and source of his art, Charles Ross creates large-scale prisms to project the solar spectrum into architectural spaces; focuses sunlight into powerful beams to create solar burn works; and draws the quantum behavior of light with dynamite. He also works with a variety of other media, including photography and video. Ross enables his viewers to experience different facets of the relationship between light and space by staging his works in diverse settings, from one-room installations like his Hanging Islands, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, to his ongoing project Star Axis, a monumental work of land art in the New Mexico desert. In this conversation held on February 24, 2019, in conjunction with the special installation Spaces: Works from the Collection, 1966–1976, Ross discusses his career with Gallery curator James Meyer.