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The INTO LIGHT: Faces of Drug Addiction: Real People, Real Stories exhibition at Utah State University’s Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art is now closed. The exhibit, which ran from August 20 to November 29, 2025, featured hand-drawn graphite portraits and personal stories of Utah residents who died from drug overdose, poisoning, or related causes. It was part of a national project led by Theresa Clower, founder of the Into Light Project, to humanize the opioid crisis and reduce stigma. A special reception on August 23, 2025, included luminary lantern lighting and naloxone training in honor of International Overdose Awareness Day.
... summarize the exhibit for those unable to attend
The INTO LIGHT: Faces of Drug Addiction: Real People, Real Stories exhibition at Utah State University’s Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (NEHMA) ran from August 20 to November 29, 2025, and is now closed. It featured hand-drawn graphite portraits and personal narratives of Utah residents who died from drug overdose, poisoning, or related causes. Each portrait was created from family-submitted photos and accompanied by a written story, aiming to humanize individuals lost to addiction and reduce stigma. The exhibit was part of a national project founded by Theresa Clower, who began drawing portraits after losing her son, Devin, to an accidental overdose. The NEHMA exhibition included 15 Utah stories, with a special reception on August 23, 2025, aligned with International Overdose Awareness Day, featuring luminary lighting, naloxone training, and recovery stories. Though the physical exhibit has ended, digital versions of the portraits and stories can be viewed at: intolightproject.org/exhibits.
... the INTO LIGHT virtual exhibit at the provided hyperlink is very effective, having the effect on viewers not so much as that of a "show" than as a metaphorical 'chapel of meditation' similar to the effect of the famous Rothko Chapel
The comparison between the INTO LIGHT virtual exhibit and the Rothko Chapel is deeply fitting. Like the Rothko Chapel—where Mark Rothko’s monumental, meditative paintings evoke profound emotional and spiritual reflection—the INTO LIGHT Project creates a contemplative, chapel-like space through art and personal narrative. Visitors to the virtual exhibit often describe a quiet, introspective experience, akin to entering a sacred space. The black-and-white graphite portraits, each drawn from family photos and paired with intimate life stories, invite slow, reverent viewing. Much like Rothko’s color fields, which son Christopher Rothko described as aiming to “touch our inner beings,” the INTO LIGHT portraits bypass rhetoric and speak directly to the heart, evoking grief, empathy, and connection. The absence of sound, the stark visual simplicity, and the focus on individual humanity all contribute to a meditative atmosphere, where viewers are not merely observing an exhibit but engaging in an act of remembrance. As one meditation study noted, profound light experiences in contemplative settings can evoke “bliss” and “inner glow”—a resonance mirrored in how INTO LIGHT uses the metaphor of light to reclaim dignity and visibility for those lost to addiction. In this way, the digital exhibit transcends a traditional gallery format, becoming a virtual chapel of memory and healing, much like the Rothko Chapel, where art becomes a vessel for collective mourning and transcendence.
... a sensitive provided synopsis; for although Mark Rothko was an abstract artists – and as the subject of the INTO LIGHT exhibit is figurative, literal pencil drawings of the faces of deceased subjects - the aesthetic effect of both exhibits is subdued and shorn of any superfluous ornamentation or decoration more than is needed to frame the intended significance of the exhibition
The INTO LIGHT exhibit and Mark Rothko’s Chapel share a profound aesthetic and emotional kinship, despite one being figurative and the other abstract. Both employ radical minimalism—stripped of ornament, narrative excess, or dramatic lighting—to create spaces of deep contemplation and emotional resonance.
In INTO LIGHT, the hand-drawn pencil portraits are rendered with quiet precision, their monochromatic tones and unadorned presentation focusing attention on the humanity of each subject. The absence of color, decoration, or visual clutter directs the viewer inward, much like Rothko’s dark, layered canvases, which appear black at first glance but reveal subtle chromatic depths upon sustained viewing.
Rothko rejected the idea of art as representation, seeking instead to evoke spiritual and existential presence through color and form. Similarly, INTO LIGHT transcends mere portraiture; it becomes a meditative encounter with loss, memory, and dignity. The exhibit’s layout—reminiscent of a sanctuary—encourages slow, reverent engagement, paralleling the hushed, skylit space of the Rothko Chapel, where viewers are surrounded by art that does not declare, but invites.
Both works rely on emotional weight carried by simplicity: Rothko’s veiled rectangles of color, emerging from darkness; the INTO LIGHT portraits, emerging from erasure. Neither demands attention through spectacle. Instead, they offer a space for quiet witness, where the viewer’s own reflection becomes part of the experience—transforming grief into a shared, sacred stillness.
... finally, to this reviewer's sensibility, the spiritual sensitivity regarding the afterlife implicit in the exhibit name "INTO LIGHT", paralleling the artist Mark Rothko's memorial as a chapel, effectively establishes for both a high-level meaning of hope transcending the worldly concerns of both life and art
The INTO LIGHT exhibit and Rothko Chapel both evoke a spiritual sensibility centered on transcendence through simplicity and light, despite their differing forms—one figurative, the other abstract. The exhibit name "Into Light" alludes to near-death experiences and the afterlife, where light symbolizes peace, reunion, and release from suffering—a theme echoed in Rothko’s luminous, layered canvases that seem to glow from within, inviting contemplation of the ineffable. For Rothko, art was a moral and spiritual act. His dark, meditative paintings—especially in the Chapel—were designed not as decoration but as vessels for tragedy, ecstasy, and ultimate transcendence. He sought to strip away the superficial, creating spaces where viewers might confront fundamental human emotions and, in that confrontation, find a form of sacred stillness. Similarly, INTO LIGHT strips away stigma and judgment, presenting each portrait and story as an act of witness and reverence, transforming grief into dignity. Both works frame silence as sacred. The Rothko Chapel, with its skylit dimness and enveloping color fields, functions as a modern non-denominational sanctuary, where sorrow and hope coexist. INTO LIGHT, in its quiet digital and physical presence, becomes a memorial chapel of the contemporary soul, where the faces of those lost to addiction are not mourned in isolation but honored as part of a shared human journey. In this light—literal and metaphorical—both Rothko’s art and the INTO LIGHT Project affirm a hope beyond despair, not through dogma, but through the aesthetic embodiment of compassion, presence, and the enduring possibility of renewal.