Brothers create mural at Duke to make statement about coronavirus deaths
The United States crossed the grim mark of 100,000 people who have died from COVID-19.
Posted — Updated“Lives are being lost, people are dying so it’s just a matter of saying 'see the lives that are lost',” said Leo Egger, who created the mural with his brother, Oliver.
“I just thought it would be particularly powerful to just confront how crazy large this is and how many people have died from this,” Leo Egger said.
The Egger brothers said they came up with the idea after seeing the newspaper's cover last Sunday.
“We were inspired by our family friend, Sarah Bryce, who showed us the New York Times cover, and we talked about how the front cover shows about 350 names and the whole newspaper shows 1,000 names," Oliver Egger said. "But we wanted to visually capture and show this community and hopefully the world what really the vast size of 100,000 names is.”
On Monday, the brothers made 310 copies of the New York Times' front page and spent three hours pasting the names of strangers to Duke's free expression tunnel.
“If you step back, it doesn’t look like names, you can’t read it," Leo Egger said. "If you look at this far, it doesn’t look like anything I'd like to imagine. "It’s a piece of fabric or something. It’s like an abstract art piece.
"But when you come forward and see the names and see the people and read the description it’s like wow, this is a time of mourning. This is a time where all of America should be grieving.”
“We’ve lost more people than the entire Vietnam War, by almost two fold, which is a huge number since the start of 2020," Oliver Egger said. "This is a wake-up call to confront it and look at it.”
“These were people who lived lives and made up our communities," Oliver Egger said.
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