Thirty-four black-and-white portraits line the common room of Walter Webb Hall — each one a person lost to overdose, each paired with a biography shared by their family.

“INTO LIGHT — Drug Addiction: Real People, Real Stories” is a national art project now in 21 states. The Walter Webb Hall exhibit featured 34 Central Texans, ranging in age from 16 to 54. Theresa Clower, the project’s founder, lost her son to an overdose in 2018. She drew his portrait from a photo taken five hours before he died, then kept going — one face at a time.

Tiffany Anschutz, a UT Social Work alumna and founder of Sage Recovery & Wellness Center, helped bring the exhibit to the School. Her stepsister, Roxana Cain, who died in 2019, is among those portrayed.

Travis County recorded 380 overdose deaths in 2024 — down 22% from 2023, mirroring the first national decline in years. Fentanyl remains a deadly threat, and overdose is still the leading cause of accidental death in the county.

“This exhibit is not only a tribute — it’s a call to action,” said Dean Allan Cole at the unveiling during the School’s 75th anniversary celebration. “It invites us to confront addiction as a public health crisis and to respond with compassion, understanding, and advocacy.”

The exhibit closed at the end of May. Families were able to keep the portraits.

The work behind the work

The exhibit found a fitting home at UT Social Work, where substance use research runs deep. The late Dr. Lori Holleran Steiker founded SHIFT in 2019 to transform student substance-use culture, a legacy now carried forward through the Lori Holleran Steiker Endowed Faculty Chair in Substance Use and Recovery, held by Dr. Mary M. Velasquez.

Dr. Kasey Claborn, director of the Addiction Research Institute and inaugural recipient of the Lori Holleran Steiker Award, credits the recent decline in overdose deaths to wider distribution of naloxone and other overdose-reversing treatments. Awareness matters too. “Research has shown that stigma proliferates in spaces where we don’t have connections, where we don’t have direct understanding of human experience,” she said.

That research continues. Doctoral student Jake Samora recently received an NIH R36 Dissertation Award, and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Katie McCormick received a K01 Career Development Award from NIH — both advancing overdose prevention initiatives.