Grief Into Action: The INTO LIGHT Project Comes to Santa Barbara
41 Faces. 41 Stories. One Room That Changes You.
You walk in expecting an event. You walk out carrying something you didn't have before.
That's what happened at our recent District House gathering, when the INTO LIGHT Project came to LoDo Studios and brought with them something rare: a room full of grief that had been transformed into something you could see, feel, and stand inside of.
The INTO LIGHT Project is a national non-profit doing something deceptively simple and profoundly necessary. They take the people we've lost to drug addiction — the ones who became statistics, the ones whose names disappeared into overdose reports — and they give them back their faces. Their stories. Their humanity.
For the California Exhibition, artist and District House speaker Elizabeth Jones painted 40 original portraits. Not illustrations. Not symbols. Portraits — one for each person lost to drug overdose whose family trusted the project with their story. Forty acts of witness, one canvas at a time. Elizabeth spent over a decade working at the intersection of art and social justice before joining INTO LIGHT in 2022, and the work of painting these portraits deepened their own recovery while sharpening a conviction they now carry openly: that when we extend humanity to people who've died from addiction, we make more room for compassion everywhere. For people living unhoused. For people struggling with mental illness. For anyone the system tends to forget.
That's not a small idea. That's a philosophy of care.
Bernadette Brierley came to California from Ireland more than three decades ago. She built a life here. A career at Apple. A marriage. Three children. Deep roots.
In November 2020, her middle daughter Jessica was killed by fentanyl poisoning.
Grief could have stopped there. For so many families, it does. The loss is too large, too sharp, too isolating. But Bernadette found the INTO LIGHT Project, participated in their 2022 California Exhibition, and became one of the organization's most committed advocates. She has personally rallied her network to raise enough funding to support three exhibitions. She carries Jessica forward, not as a cautionary tale, but as a full human being who was loved and is still missed — and with the quiet certainty that her daughter would be proud of the work.
Sitting with Bernadette and hearing her speak about Jessica in the conversation that opened the evening was a reminder of something we all know but rarely let ourselves feel: behind every overdose statistic is a family that is still living with what happened. Still loving. Still grieving. Still here.
The Room With 41 Stories
After the conversation, we took a break. Not a casual one. We asked everyone to walk the room.
The installation was up on the walls — 41 portraits, 41 names, 41 stories. Families had submitted photos, memories, details. The installations don't sanitize the deaths or soften the circumstances. They show you who these people were. Their humor. Their talents. Their relationships. The specific, irreplaceable texture of a life.
The room got quiet in the way that only happens when people are really present. People moved slowly. Some stood for a long time in front of one face. Some cried. Some reached for the person next to them. That's what this project does — it creates space for a grief that most of us have been carrying privately, in families and communities that didn't quite know how to talk about it.
Fentanyl poisoning doesn't stay in one neighborhood or income bracket or zip code. It has reached into nearly every kind of family there is. The people in those portraits looked like people most of us know.
The Installation Is Still Up. Come See It.
This is one of the things we try to do at District216 — bring conversations into the room that the rest of culture is still figuring out how to have. Addiction. Loss. Recovery. The human cost of a crisis that is ongoing and largely invisible to the people it hasn't touched yet.
The INTO LIGHT installation is still on view at LoDo Studios, at 216 E. Gutierrez St. in Santa Barbara, for the next several months. It is free to visit. You don't need to have lost someone. You don't need to have struggled yourself. You just need to be willing to stand in front of another person's story and let it matter.
That's it. That's the whole ask.
We'll see you there. 🍄💜
