truce flag

Ms. Clark, a professor of art and art history at Amherst College in Massachusetts, is presenting the truce flag as a counterweight to the familiar red and blue battle flag of the Confederacy that is commercially reproduced on merchandise including T-shirts, bumper stickers, and dish towels, and is seen by its critics as a symbol of racism.

The huge truce flag was created in three sections by a commercial weaver in Pennsylvania, and stitched together, Ms. Talbott said.

A huge linen replica of the truce flag, measuring 15 feet by 30 feet, or 10 times the size of the original, has been woven by the museum, and sits in a separate gallery on the eighth floor, near 100 smaller versions of the flag, all woven to scale.

Kate Masur, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, said that drawing attention to the truce flag has the potential to shift public perceptions about the end of the Civil War that are now dominated by the battle flag.

“She’s trying to help people imagine what it would have been like if that truce flag had become the flag we all remembered as the Confederate flag,” Ms. Masur said.