Sonya Clark
Confederate, Surrender, 2022
Mixografia print on handmade paper
43.75 x 23.25 x 0.75 inches
Edition of 30
Sonya Clark’s Confederate, Surrender centers on a seemingly quotidian object imbued with monumental historical weight: a white tea towel with red pin stripes, originally woven in Richmond, Virginia. The work examines the history of the Confederate Flag of Truce raised by General Robert E. Lee’s army at Appomattox (April 9, 1865).1 Fashioned from a simple kitchen dish towel, the Truce Flag signaled the collapse of soldiers fighting to preserve the institution of slavery.
By reconstructing this object in print form, Clark disrupts the visual dominance of the Confederate battle flag—a symbol inextricably linked to the violent defense of Black enslavement and its persistent legacy of racism. Instead, she redirects attention to the modest textile that signaled the Confederacy’s surrender—the quiet wave of a domestic object that initiated the formal conclusion of a war waged against Black freedom.
In an interview between Sonya Clark and Paul Farber, archived on the Monument Lab website, Clark recalls her experience as a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellow in 2011. During that time, she visited the National Museum of American History, where a long line of visitors had gathered to view the Star-Spangled Banner. In another exhibit, she encountered Abraham Lincoln’s iconic top hat, displayed within an exhibition on American presidents. In the same display case, however, she noticed a small, folded textile labeled “Confederate Flag of Truce”—a quiet but charged object placed alongside one of the nation’s most revered presidential artifacts.
“It wasn’t hidden, just largely unamplified,” said Clark. “It is not that it was undiscovered, but that it hasn’t lived in public memory the way other flags have”— And so she sought to bring attention to that overlooked history.2 “I suspect most people know the Confederate flag but don’t know about the Confederate truce flag?” said Clark. “What would it mean if we had focused our attention on the surrender and all that it implied? Where might we be now?”3
[Note to reader: American historian, museum director, and public scholar Dr. Lonnie G. Bunch III curated the “Truce Flag” into the aforementioned exhibition before later serving as the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and, subsequently, as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.]
As an intimate domestic textile, a dish towel is typically handled, folded, and worn through repetitive labor. In this dimensional print—rendered to emphasize the truce flag’s specific weave structure—Sonya Clark elevates a once-utilitarian cloth into a charged historical artifact.
Clark characterizes her engagement with fraught national symbols as an “amplifying, educative intervention.”4Rather than smoothing over tension, she preserves it through tactile processes that insist on material and historical presence. By reimagining the towel-turned-truce flag, Clark reframes surrender not as mutual reconciliation between equal parties, but as the necessary dismantling of a regime built upon racial violence.
Through this artistic gesture, Sonya Clark redirects national memory toward an object worthy of recognition, replacing Confederate iconography with a symbol of its collapse. Clark states, “That's the power of art. That's one of the things I can do as an artist—I can use my voice to amplify this historical object and other historical objects that changed our path.”5 “Amplify” is precisely what Clark accomplishes.
Confederate, Surrender centers our attention on the exact moment a system committed to enslavement was forced to yield. By foregrounding the truce flag, Clark surfaces a history that has been muted or overlooked. In doing so, Confederate, Surrender honors not only the end of the Confederacy, but also the profoundly unfinished struggle for justice that followed emancipation—and that continues today.
Footnote
[1] Rubenstein, Harry, R., “The Gentleman’s Agreement that Ended the Civil War,” What It Means to Be American, April 3, 2015
[2] Sonya Clark and Paul Farber, Monument Lab Podcast, Episode12, March 2019. https://monumentlab.com/podcast/in-pursuit-of-the-confederate-truce-flag-with-artist-sonya-clark
[3] Sonya Clark, describing her Monument Lab Podcast interview via email, 2026
[4] Sonya Clark, describing her engagement with charged historical textiles as “an act of care,” in phone conversation, 2025
[5] Sonya Clark, describing in email, 2026
