Martin Puryear was born and raised in a segregated Washington, D.C. Before completing his MFA at Yale in 1971, he traveled to Sierra Leone as a volunteer in the Peace Corps, which introduced him to traditional woodworking and building practices. He then studied printmaking at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm. While living in Sweden, he became acquainted with furniture maker James Krenov. These experiences would deeply influence his artistic practice and temper his interest in the fine arts with an equally strong admiration for craft, particularly as it is brought to bear on functional objects such as textiles, baskets, and furniture.

Puryear’s work is marked by organic materials and shapes, eschewing Minimalism’s hard-edged platonic forms and industrial methods of fabrication for softer, irregular, curvilinear geometries and traditional woodworking techniques. Although it is often abstract, his work, by way of title, can refer to specific historical figures, as in Ladder for Booker T. Washington, Some Lines for Jim Beckwourth, and A Column for Sally Hemings. Or it can take its cues from a familiar form, which for Tabernacle is a forage cap, the hat associated with Civil War soldiers.

Puryear chose the title Tabernacle as it refers to a sacred enclosed space containing an object of worship, which in this case is a form based on a Civil War siege mortar, a weapon meant to stand in for firearms more generally. “Enshrined” in the Constitution, the right to bear arms has indeed taken on the character of religious fanaticism, making Tabernacle a forthright statement about American gun culture.

Openings on either side of Tabernacle provide a view into an interior whose walls are covered with a billowing nineteenth-century floral fabric that originated in India. This textile was popularized through European colonization, increasing the demand for cotton and in turn fueling the expansion of chattel slavery in the U.S. At the center of Tabernacle is a steel mortar cannon, invoking mid-nineteenth-century warfare and the iron industry that was likewise reliant on enslaved labor. The opening at the hat’s top resembles the crosshair of a gun and offers a view down the barrel of the cannon loaded with smooth, reflective ammunition. Upon peering inside, the viewer becomes the ammunition’s target, begging the question of who is shooting at whom. The opening at the top of the hat may then be considered a portal between the past as signified by cap and cannon, and our present on this side of the crosshairs. Given that Puryear’s work is more connotative than denotative, how might the viewer consider the relationship between the Civil War and gun violence? And what, if any, relationship is there between that past and this present?

The right to bear arms is emblematic of a freedom that stands in stark contrast to the freedom granted to 4 million Blacks at the close of the Civil War. And bearing in mind that the Civil War was fought to end slavery, how does race factor into a consideration of the relationship between the Civil War and gun violence? While gun violence can affect anyone, regardless of race, perceptions of gun violence may depend on who you ask. Given that Tabernacle overtly references the Civil War and that the legacy of slavery is part and parcel of any historical trajectory which has that as its starting point, questions of who is shooting at whom, under what conditions and in what context, are loaded ones indeed.