NC twins use copies of New York Times page and spray paint to make a statement at Duke
Two Durham teens pasted 100 copies of Sunday’s front page of The New York Times outside the free expression tunnel at Duke University to show the nearly 100,000 people who have died because of the coronavirus pandemic.
They wrote “100,000 lives” with black spray paint above the copies.
Leo and Oliver Egger, 18-year-old twins, were struck by the power and simplicity of the newspaper front page and wanted to show their community what 100,000 names looks like.
“I’ve been finding the relationship to these numbers hard to grasp, but these are human lives,” Leo Egger said. “From far away it looks like an abstract painting but the closer you get the names come into focus.”
He said the list illuminates what this loss means and how big it is, which is sometimes hard to realize when you’re in the middle of a catastrophe.
‘They’re not just statistics’
The individual descriptions of each person on the page also stuck with them.
“All of these people who added so much to the world and committed so much to their family and friends,” Oliver Egger said. “They’re not just statistics. That’s so true. They were us. These were the people that made up our community.”
The twin brothers graduated from the Durham School of the Arts and are both freshmen in college. Leo was at Yale University and Oliver was at Wesleyan University until the campuses closed earlier this spring.
They’re active in the arts community but haven’t painted a mural before. Leo started a local theater company in Durham called Eno River Players and directs the Shakespeare plays they put on. Oliver is an actor in those productions.
The pandemic has taken away that connection, the space to express themselves and the opportunity to bring people together, Leo said, which has been frustrating and difficult.
This piece feels like the closest thing to theater they can make, he said.
“You are confronted with just the sheer volume of names and with those words ‘100,000 lives,’” Leo said. “It’s a kind of socially-distanced theater.”
A ‘wake-up call’
They made copies of the cover, and glued them to the wall outside the tunnel, which took more than three hours. Putting up those pages on Monday helped them and hopefully helps their community understand the gravity of what’s happening, Leo said.
They went back to the site on Tuesday to touch up the mural and saw people stopping for a moment to stare at it.
Oliver said he hopes people walking by see it and reflect on what’s happening as the number of deaths has soared past the death toll of the Vietnam War. He said the mural isn’t necessarily political, but it’s a “wake-up call.”
“We’ve grown to be so numb as this crisis has dragged on and on,” Oliver said. “We wanted to really capture in a visual way, similar to how The Times cover did, the real size of this loss and the real size of this situation.”
The coronavirus pandemic isn’t over because people are tired of it, Oliver said, and we can’t grow complicit.
This story was originally published May 26, 2020 at 6:27 PM.
