Fort D. A. Russell was called Camp Albert (then Camp Marfa) when founded in 1911 to deter partisans of Pancho Villa from entering American territory during the Mexican Revolution. It was a cavalry encampment and a base for Army Signal Corps airplanes patrolling the border. The garrison accommodated about 400 soldiers during World War I. In 1930 the War Department designated Camp Marfa as a permanent fort, naming it Fort D. A. Russell. It was closed in 1933 but reopened in 1935 to train artillery units and officers. During World War II, the garrison grew to 1,000, and the fort grounds were expanded to more than 2,000 acres donated by Marfa citizens. Several hundred German prisoners of war were interned at the fort during the war. When the U.S. Army decommissioned the fort in 1946 and deaccessioned the property in 1949, it was sold in separate tracts. The Dia Foundation bought the eastern part of the reservation for Judd in 1981, as well as additional land.
The radial layout of Cavalry Row now consists of eleven U-plan barracks built in 1920 and two truck garage buildings built in 1939 on S. Hill Street. Judd’s first architectural interventions at the fort involved the truck garages, which he called the Artillery Sheds. In 1984–1985 he stripped the flat-roofed buildings to their concrete and brick shells, replaced garage doors with aluminum-framed window walls, and built self-supporting steel Quonset vaults atop the concrete roof decks of both buildings to give each a more pronounced profile in the landscape. These became the setting for Judd’s 100 milled aluminum boxes. Judd’s 15 concrete box culvert sculptures, installed along U.S. 67, are also visible from the Artillery Sheds. The barracks were allotted to permanent installations by different artists, including Claes Oldenburg, Richard Long, Ilya Kabakov, and Dan Flavin.
Ford, Powell and Carson of San Antonio have been the foundation’s architects since 2000. They worked with Los Angeles artist Robert Irwin to reconstruct the Post Hospital (1919) as the Irwin Project, a series of chambers in which to experience different conditions of darkness and light (2016).
The Chinati Foundation’s presence in Marfa attracted well-to-do art patrons, who began purchasing properties in the town in the 1990s, giving the community an economic burst. Galleries and shops opened, producing a small but tenacious artistic community.