9 Jan 2024

The Black Experience at Fort Huachuca during WWII: An Interpretation and Exhibit Plan for the Mountain View Officers’ Club

Abstract: This technical report serves as a contextual planning document for an interpretive exhibit within and surrounding the Mountain View Officers’ Club, Building 66050, at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. During World War II (WWII), the Mountain View Officers’ Club served as the installation’s Black officers’ club. It served as various other uses until 2004, at which point it became vacant. Today, Fort Huachuca is planning to rehabilitate the building into a mission use space with an indoor-outdoor exhibit space for visitor use within the rehabilitation plan footprint, an 8.15 acre Area of Potential Effect (APE) including the WWII building and associated adjacent features. This report provides numerous potential Courses of Action regarding methods of exhibiting and interpreting historic materials and information in the public spaces within the APE. The Courses of Action chosen during a future Design-Build phase will be based on factors currently unknown, such as funding and staffing; thus, this document serves as a Phase I concept plan for ideas that will be further developed and finalized during the Phase II Design-Build phase. This report also provides guidance for course of action implementation pending factors currently unknown. Fort Huachuca will keep this report in both digital and analog format in perpetuity. ERDC-CERL will also publish it online and make it available to the public free of cost.

21 Jun 2023

A History and Analysis of the WPA Exhibit of Black Art at the Fort Huachuca Mountain View Officers’ Club, 1943–1946

Abstract: The 1943 art exhibition at the Mountain View Officers’ Club (MVOC), Fort Huachuca, Arizona should be considered one of the most significant events in the intersection of American art, military history, and segregation. Organizers of the event, entitled Exhibition of the Work of 37 Negro Artists, anticipated it would boost soldiers’ morale because Fort Huachuca was a predominately Black duty station during WWII. This report provides a brief history of Black art in the early 20th century, biographies of the artists showcased, and provides information (where known) about repositories that have originals or reproductions of the art today. The following is recommended: the General Services Administration (GSA) investigate the ownership of the pieces described in this report and if they are found to have been created under one of the New Deal art programs to add them to their inventory, further investigation be performed on the provenance and ownership of Lew Davis’s The Negro in America’s Wars mural, for the rehabilitation of the MVOC that the consulting parties agree upon the scope of the reproduction of the art, and request archival full reproductions of the pieces of art found in the collection of the Howard University Gallery of Art.