This monumental 32-by-70-inch horizontal panorama documents the hospital at Heart Mountain Relocation Center—one of the few surviving structures from the Wyoming camp where 14,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned from 1942 to 1945. The nearly six-foot width captures the institutional architecture that provided medical care within the contradiction of government that simultaneously confined citizens and claimed to protect their welfare.

Created in 1995, the work documents a building whose survival resulted from post-war conversion to agricultural or community use—the hospital’s substantial construction enabling adaptation beyond original purpose while tar-paper barracks quickly deteriorated.

The hospital’s presence within Heart Mountain represented the incarceration system’s strange attentiveness to internee health. Japanese American doctors and nurses staffed the facility, treating patients whose illness often resulted from camp conditions: respiratory problems from dust and cold, psychological strain from confinement, injuries from labor in camp operations. The medical care provided while constitutional rights were suspended exemplifies the system’s contradictions.

Heart Mountain’s extreme climate made the hospital essential: winter temperatures reaching minus thirty degrees, summer heat reflecting off sagebrush desert, wind that never stopped. Elderly internees and infants were particularly vulnerable, the camp’s demographics (including many too young or too old for productive labor) undermining government claims that removal served “military necessity.”

The horizontal format captures the hospital’s institutional scale—a structure serving thousands, the architectural vocabulary of government efficiency applied to medical care for imprisoned citizens. The building’s survival among vanished barracks creates selective memorial, the substantial construction that enabled medical care outlasting the flimsy structures that constituted daily living space.

Heart Mountain’s hospital now forms part of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center complex, its preserved architecture enabling visitors to understand institutional life under incarceration.