Las Vegas Weekly

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The oft-used saying one death a tragedy, a million a statistic plays on perception. In reality, a million deaths, particularly when unjust, equate to a million tragedies. But given the layer of separation in the comfort of our communities, cultures and homes, tragedy doesn’t fully sink in until a more tactile experience comes along—the shoes of Holocaust survivors or, in the case of the One Million Bones project, human bones rendered from clay. On First Friday last week, Clay Arts Vegas on Main Street displayed 8,000 bones—toes, ribs, femurs, vertebrae, jaws and fingers spread out carefully in a parking lot—all of which will be sent to Washington, D.C., for the One Million Bones project, designed to acknowledge the millions of lives lost to genocide and crises in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Burma. Every bone equals $1 designated (up to $500,000) for CARE, a humanitarian organization fighting poverty in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.