In the spring of 1865, a seemingly unremarkable dishcloth played a crucial role in ending the Civil War as the South's flag of surrender at Appomattox. A Confederate horseman carried a humble white linen towel into the lines of General George Custer, near the courthouse at Appomattox. The horseman was sent on behalf of General Robert E. Lee, who was requesting a suspension of hostilities while General Ulysses S. Grant proposed terms of surrender. Focusing on this Confederate Flag of Truce, Afro-Caribbean American artist (and professor at Amherst College) Sonya Clark (born 1967) explores the legacy of symbols and challenges the power of propaganda, erasures and omissions through her works. By making the Truce Flag a cloth that brokered peace and represented the promise of reconciliation into a monumental alternative to the infamous Confederate Battle Flag and its pervasive divisiveness, Clark instigates a role reversal and aims to correct a historical imbalance.
Notes
Catalog of an exhibition held at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, March 29, 2019 - August 4, 2019; H & R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute, MO, January 31 - March 21, 2020; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, October 8, 2020 - March 7, 2021.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references.
Contents
Foreword / by Susan Lubowsky Talbott
We hold these truths / by Valerie Cassel Oliver
"A piece of cloth that brings a nation to its knees" / by W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Monumental and many
Reconstruction exercise
Lesson plan (Confederate Truce Flag)
Reversals
Propaganda and title wall
About the artist
Acknowledgments
About The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
Other title(s)
Monumental cloth, the flag we should know
ISBN
9780998701868 ((hardcover))
0998701866 ((hardcover))
OCLC
1157344919
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