“Why is it that I know one of the many Confederate battle flags so well that I could draw it for you now, but I don’t know the piece of cloth that was pressed into service to end the Civil War? Why don’t I know that? And what can I do about it?” - Sonya Clark (
@sysclark )
While
#Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 when Union soldiers finally arrived in Galveston, TX, and announced that the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, Sonya Clark’s Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know, shines a light on an obscure object that played an outsized role in ending the war.
When Clark was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the
@amhistorymuseum , she came across a fragment of the Confederate flag of truce—a common dishtowel—displayed next to President Lincoln’s top hat. The dishtowel was used by Gen. Robert E. Lee to negotiate the Confederate Army’s terms of surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9th, 1865. Clark’s encounter with the humble cloth had a profound impact on the artist, and it inspired the Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know series.
The project forces us to ask, “What if this were the symbol that endured?” It challenges us to rethink the hateful legacy of the Confederate battle flag: what if the lasting symbol was one of the full defeat of Confederate ideology and recognition of slavery as a key cause of the war? What if Black humanity were celebrated rather than denigrated?
The series of works that resulted reproduce the truce flag at different scales with the goal of challenging the pervasive visibility and power of the Confederate battle flag.
We invite you to the Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other galleries today from 2-6 p.m. for activations of Clark’s interactive and tactile communal art projects, which challenge us to examine the country’s historical imbalances and racial injustices through material transformation.
