“The flag
we should know...”
we should know...”
You have probably seen and used a traditional American dishtowel – off white cotton ‘waffle weave’ with narrow red stripes at the long fringe ends. They are absorbent, durable and humble in appearance.
It was such a towel that General Robert E Lee instructed his staff to hold up as the flag of truce at Appomattox in 1865. This little known actual cloth ‘flag’ is housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, donated by the family of General George A. Custer, who was present at the surrender. And yet, until artist Sonya Clark examined it and then re interpreted it, few knew this history.
Now imagine a traditional dishtowel the size of a room, rooted in American history. This is exactly what artist Sonya Clark imagined and created, but 10 times its original size.
Monumental Cloth: The Flag We Should Know, 2019, is 31 feet long by 15 ½ feet wide, woven in cotton yarn. Part of the Renwick Gallery’s exhibition “This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World” (now closed). It filled a whole gallery with its simplicity of weave and complexity of American history. It is a powerful commentary on America’s legacy of racial violence. Up close, it is a beautiful 3-dimensnional-weave pattern, each square like the center of a flower.
Sonya Clark asks the audience:
What if this flag of truce was the flag we knew, instead of the Confederate battle flag?
What if every time we used our dishtowels this symbol of the end of America’s Civil War,
we were reminded of that staggeringly brutal period, and the legacy of slavery and emancipation.
Preservation and display of such an enormous and stretchy textile takes a large team and a lot of planning. Our work involved carefully unfolding the flag, rolling it on a huge tube to accommodate the vacuuming of the entire surface front and back.
Using laser lights and taut strings, we aligned the cloth, so that the geometric grid of the textile was straight. Fringes were combed and laid out, and errant dust bunnies removed. At the end of the exhibition, we repeated this process over a two-day period.
I want everyone to know what this flag is,
so we can conceive of what truce really means.
—Sonya Clark
so we can conceive of what truce really means.
—Sonya Clark
Until September 2023, Sonya Clark has an exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum, “Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other”. https://cranbrookartmuseum.org/exhibition/sonya-clark-we-are-each-other/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/sonya-clark-on-the-confederate-truce-flag-and-creating-a-collective-work-of-healing
photos by Julia Brennan, at Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Great and important work. Congratulations on a job well done!
Thanks for sharing this wonderful story!💥💥💥💥
Beautiful creativity by Sonya Clark. Great photos by Julia Brennan. And a meaningful question posed by Ms. Clark. What better way to signal that the Confederacy lost , Slavery legal no more , Freedom and a Union prevailed than the truce flag. . Thank you Julia Brennan for sharing this story.
Thank you for this New thing i got from this sharing, Julia… very large and niat job…
Congratulations.