Chasing Rainbows

Each morning as our planet rotates eastward, sunlight rises along the walls of the Getty Center, illuminating the rough travertine walls.

At a certain point the radiance reaches the roof and pierces the skylights of the Museum Entrance Hall’s rotunda, throwing pale crescents that slowly arc across the floor. Thousands of visitors traverse the space every day, but this radiant choreography is rarely noticed. Until the rainbows appeared.

Last August, Plexiglas prisms, each about eight feet long, were mounted under the skylights. Clear and nearly invisible, they constitute half of the installation Spectrum 14 by American artist Charles Ross (b. 1937). The other half relies on the Earth’s rotation and the light of our nearest star. Once sunbeams enter the angled prisms, their spectrum of colors bends and separates, sending large rainbow swaths across the floor, stairwell, and walls.

“It’s kind of a miracle, don’t you think?” says Ross, referring to the simple but dazzling effects. His prisms don’t produce the usual rainbows we know from hanging a faceted crystal in a window. These are richer, more vibrant, and big enough for visitors to stand or lie in. In the afternoon, they also climb up the marble walls of the Entrance Hall and expose bands of subtler luminescent colors, like light pink and lilac. In short, they’re spectacular, honed by an artist who has worked with prisms and cosmic juxtapositions for 60 years.

“I was studying math and physics at Berkeley,” Ross recalls, “and was required to take two credits in liberal arts—but I really didn’t want to. My advisor suggested I take sculpture for the easy A. A few months later, I was called into his office because my grades had fallen. Why? Because I had found sculpture.” After graduating from Berkeley with a BA in mathematics and an MA in sculpture, Ross made welded metal works and entered the freewheeling avant-garde scenes of early 1960s San Francisco and New York.

Then a dream changed everything. In 1965, while in San Francisco, technical drawings of a large-scale prism sculpture came to Ross as he slept. When he woke up, he knew he had to make what he’d dreamed. From then on, he focused on creating and exhibiting prisms, an austere form that was embraced in the era of minimalism. Soon his objects became secondary to the spectrum of colors they projected, or, in his words, “the orchestration of spectrum light became the artwork.” At first, he used spotlights on the prisms, but found the resulting spectrum was of low quality and too static. “It wasn’t moving and alive like the solar spectrum,” he explains.

Over the past six decades, Ross has created solar spectra around the world, some temporary and others permanent. He aimed to install them so that at least one would always be projecting light as the Earth rotated. “I’ve created 24 permanent solar spectrum installations throughout the US and around the world, including in Japan and Tasmania,” he notes. “As the spectrum is fading in one location on the planet, it’s rising in another.”

Making art of the sun

Sunlight can make rainbows or start fires, and Ross focused on the latter in his ongoing Solar Burn series, begun in 1971. He concentrated sunlight through a lens to char designs onto wood panels. The blackened scars were made over several hours, again reflecting the turning of the Earth, and thinned out when passing clouds blocked the sun.

Ross’s interests have endured for many years, and the same is true of his most ambitious project, Star Axis, a massive concrete, granite, sandstone, and stainless steel “earth/star sculpture” in the eastern New Mexico desert. With a small crew, Ross has worked on Star Axis every summer since 1976, after he purchased the land and made the calculations with the help of astronomers and engineers. Inspired by ancient pyramids and other structures created to observe and honor astronomical events, Star Axis is an immersive artwork that includes a solar pyramid and a 10-story stairway topped with an aperture that frames the orbit of Polaris. It’s projected to reach completion in 2025 or 2026 and will be sure to join the pantheon of Southwest land art, like James Turrell’s Roden Crater or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels—all highlighting timeless celestial phenomena.

Ross’s work at Getty was commissioned as part of the exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, the Museum’s flagship presentation for the citywide PST ART initiative. In Lumen (which closed December 8, 2024), objects from the Middle Ages in Europe revealed early explorations of optics, astronomy, and the nature of light. Spectrum 14 (which runs through September 13, 2026) extends that theme seamlessly into the present, with a display that is both scientifically grounded and awe inspiring.

Spectrum 14 will change over the seasons as the Earth’s axis tilts toward and away from the sun. Dramatic day-to-day changes will occur during the equinoxes and slow down around the solstices. “Something to watch for,” he advises, “is that every once in a while, the solar spectrum will descend vertically down one of the columns in the hall. As the work evolves, the solar spectrum from one prism will fade as the spectrum from another prism will appear and gain brilliance. Occasionally, one of the spectrums on the floor will pass through another, so you can see the colors combine and change.” To best experience it, in other words, visit often.

For all the uncertainty in our daily lives, the planet will keep on spinning. And the cosmos itself? As Ross says, “Well, it’s always there waiting to be noticed in all its mystery and splendor.”