Nick Paumgarten: How Clifford Ross Learned Stained Glass from the Masters: The New Yorker Of the $787 billion in stimulus spending signed into law in February, 2009, after the financial meltdown, around a hundred million went toward the construction of a new federal courthouse in Austin, Texas. It had been in the works for years. Three years earlier, a committee, including two federal judges, had convened to commission art work for it. They were particularly interested in the work of Clifford Ross, a multimedia artist from New York, whose large-scale photographs of crashing waves, taken while he stood in the Long Island surf during various hurricanes, had the grandeur and the classicism that suited the project, and their tastes. They imagined that he could fill the courthouse with big photographs of the Texas Hill Country. . . .