Sonya Clark: Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know

Read up on Monument Lab collaborator Sonya Clark’s landmark project, Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know, in a book published with the Fabric Workshop and Museum.  Includes text by Valerie Cassel Oliver and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and a foreword by Susan L. Talbott, former Executive Director of FWM. 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 work