STEMarts Lab is excited to partner with the Harwood Art Museum to bring our creative coding students on a special tour of Charles Ross: Mansions of the Zodiac. Ross’s space-inspired artworks will serve as the creative spark for students as they generate their own digital visualizations during the upcoming Google Code Next Affiliate workshop, which will take place in the Arthur Bell Auditorium on May 3, 2025 11-2pm.
Leading the workshop is New Mexico-based creative coder Ian Harrison, who has been mentoring the students through the curriculum and pushing their skills to the next level. His guidance has empowered students to explore the artistic potential of coding, using space as their muse to create stunning generative art.
The museum experience will be led by Gwen Fernandez, Curator of Education and Public Program at Harwood, who will take students behind the scenes of Ross’s visionary process. She’ll share the story of his unique approach to building “2-½D” paintings and his lifelong journey constructing Star Axis—a monumental earthwork and naked-eye observatory in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
From the Harwood Museum website:
Charles Ross: Mansions of the Zodiac is an exhibition of Ross’s artwork inspired by sunlight, starlight, time, and planetary motion. Emerging in the 1960s during the rise of minimalism and land art, Ross is considered one of the preeminent figures in the field. This exhibition opens as he nears completion of Star Axis, a massive earth/sky sculpture built into the eastern plains of New Mexico.
The works on view span pivotal moments in Ross’s career and have never before been exhibited. The Twelve Mansions of the Zodiac, Star Map Paintings (1976–78), chart the Precession of the Equinoxes. Point Source / Star Space: Weaves of Ages (1975–86) views space from the center of the Earth looking outward. These works, created in tandem with the construction of Star Axis, reveal the artist’s deep exploration of earth-to-star geometries. Also featured is Sunlight Dispersion (1971), a film co-edited with Peter Campus, showing a solar spectrum created by one of Ross’s prism sculptures as it moves through his New York studio, driven by the Earth’s rotation.
We’re so grateful for this collaboration with the Harwood Museum. It provides our students with a unique opportunity to experience the museum environment, engage with the visionary work of Charles Ross, and explore the cosmos through the lens of both art and code.