“Interior space is often the secret space of sculpture… I think of interior space as a world with enormous conceptual potential.”

—Martin Puryear, 2007

The shape of Tabernacle is based on a cap worn by soldiers in the Civil War. The sculpture’s elemental form is a steel lattice from which Puryear has suspended cotton textiles: black canvas and an early-nineteenth-century floral fabric draped underneath. Through openings in the textiles one can see its interior, which houses a Civil War siege mortar that Puryear constructed from wood, its barrel holding a polished stainless-steel cannonball. “Tabernacle contains a world within a world,” Brooke Kamin Rapaport has observed, adding, “A tabernacle is a place of worship, whether large enough to house a congregation or intended to hold a single icon.” As she points out, “Tabernacle is Puryear’s meditation on American gun violence.”