Catherine Pizzuto, who lives about a half-mile from Wheaton College, remembers when her son John “Jack” Pizzuto used to romp around on the bucolic Norton campus when he was young. “This was his playground,” Pizzuto said. Jack died at age 27 in December 2022 of an accidental overdose of fentanyl, benzodiazepines, and alcohol, his mother said.
Today, his portrait, mementos and story are displayed in a new exhibition at the college that opened this week. It aims to present the human side of drug addiction, using art to promote healing and the understanding of different perspectives. The opening was in time for International Overdose Awareness Day, which is Saturday.
The exhibition, titled “Drug Addiction: Real People, Real Stories, Massachusetts Into Light Project” is in the Beard and Weil Galleries and is open to the public. It features 41 hand-drawn portraits and personal belongings of people who have died from drug overdoses, including Jack Pizzuto, a Norton native. The art initiative is being presented throughout the country and Wheaton was chosen to be the host of the Massachusetts exhibition by the Into Light Project, a national nonprofit whose mission is to change the conversation about drug addiction through the power of original art and stories.
“It’s become more powerful than I thought possible. It’s an example of what I could have hoped an exhibition could be,” Elizabeth Hoy, director of the Beard and Weil Galleries, said. The pencil drawings of the individuals along with their personal stories and artifacts are designed to present a fuller and more personal picture of those lost to the opioid crisis in order to change perspectives on those with substance abuse disorder.
The galleries, located at 26 East Main St., are open from 1 to 5 p.m.
Tuesday through Saturday, 1 to 8 p.m. Thursday, and 10 a.
m to 5 p,m. Sunday. “All these people are our neighbors essentially,” Hoy said.
“You can see the humanity through their portraits and the objects.” On Tuesday, when the exhibition opened, Pizzuto, 68, gazed at her son’s framed portrait for the first time. “This is just beautiful,” she said.
Jack’s portrait and others are displayed with a brief story of their lives. Above his portrait are six adjectives that describe him — charming, fearless, loving, loyal, driven and conflicted. Pizzuto described her son as a typical small-town American boy who was funny, smart and loving.
He was athletic and became a captain of the Norton High School soccer team, she said, and a daring skateboarder who used to do jumps over a group of five friends lying on his driveway. But around the time he was 15 or 16, Pizzuto said Jack started to experiment with alcohol and marijuana and hang around a different set of friends. He later graduated to harder drugs when he got older as a way of coping when she was diagnosed with cancer and his older sister Madeline left for college on the West Coast.
“His whole world crumbled,” Pizzuto said. Even though Madeline was four years older, she would let Jack tag along with her friends and the pair shared a love for TV shows like “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “The Office” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Every holiday season they watched Adam Sandler’s 2002 comedy drama “Eight Crazy Nights.
” “They were like best friends,” Pizzuto said. She said her son’s personality was a great fit for his career in sales, first selling cellphones for all the major carriers and then cars before going back to cellphones and managing a store. “He was very charismatic,” Pizzuto said.
“He was good with people. He loved helping the seniors. He had a lot of patience.
” He also loved fast cars, purchasing a Lexus and later a Porsche, and was meticulous about maintaining them, hi mom said. But beneath the veneer of success, she said, her son struggled with anxiety and depression and used alcohol and drugs to self-medicate. “It all involves mental health,” Pizzuto said.
She and her husband sought court intervention to try to get him help, twice committing him to a substance abuse facility. He also stayed at an inpatient treatment center on Cape Cod to get clean and lived in a sober house at time when insurance did not pay for rehab, Pizzuto said. But the treatment and sober homes failed, Pizzuto said, adding that more measures are needed to break the cycle of addiction.
Along the way, there were car accidents and hospital stays, including once where he had to be flown by medical helicopter to a Boston hospital, and visits from police. There was also a period of sobriety. When he was 24, Jack became a father to a son, Weston, with his girlfriend, and purchased a home a year later on the Cape.
He loved being a father and took his family on annual trips to Disney World. The couple had an on-again, off-again relationship but were devoted to co-parenting the boy, Pizzuto said. “I want people to know he was a very good father,” Pizzuto said.
She described her son’s struggles with substance abuse as a “very dark time” and lauded the exhibition and the title “Into Light.” “It really humanizes people,” Pizzuto said. The Norton exhibition features 40 people in Massachusetts, including an 18-year-old, who died during an epidemic of opioid-related deaths that have claimed over 2,000 lives in the state each year for the past eight years.
In addition to the portraits, families have also sent personal mementos for the display. Visitors can see Jack Pizzuto’s keys, Kia business card, soccer captain’s armband and glass artwork that contains his ashes. There is also the Eagle Scout uniform of another individual and many other artifacts.
“The families are brave to share their stories,” Hoy said. The exhibition, which is being supported through a grant from the Mass. Cultural Council, runs until Nov.
8, and the families will be given the portrait display of their loved ones when it ends. The exhibition and others around the nation include a portrait of Into Light Project founder, artist Theresa Clower, whose son Devin died in 2018 after struggling with addiction. Clower got the idea of the project by drawing her son’s face after he died.
It was a means of therapy after years of not drawing any art. Although she had drawn other things, she had never attempted a portrait until she drew her son, according to the website. The Into Light Project selected one public academic museum or gallery in each state and wants to have displays in all 50 states by 2029.
Wheaton was selected in a competitive process because it “demonstrated a keen interest in advancing the mission of the Into Light Project to change the conversation about drug addiction through education and community outreach,” Clower said in an email. She added that the college supported the project’s interest in education, praised Hoy as very creative and energetic, and said the space where the exhibit is located is beautiful. The Beard and Weil Galleries have a history of exhibitions about social issues, Hoy said, including “Freedom is Constant Struggle,” a show rethinking mass incarceration, and “health/care,” an exhibition about health, care, time, memory, and how we connect with our humanity.
Hoy said students and faculty in various majors, including nursing, public health, psychology, and criminal justice as well as English and art history, will visit the exhibition and discuss it in their classes. The opening reception, from 1 to 3 p.m.
Saturday, Sept. 14, is also open to the public and will feature Clower speaking. Artists and family members will also attend.
There will also be peer grief support meetings open to the public. The first is at 3 p.m.
Friday, Sept. 27, and the other at 11 a.m.
Sunday, Oct. 27, in the Wheaton galleries. On International Overdose Awareness Day, an annual campaign to end overdose, events are held to remember those who have died and acknowledge the grief of family and friends left behind.
The World Health Organization says about 600,000 deaths were attributable to drug use in 2019. According to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 107,543 drug overdose deaths occurred in the U.S.
in 2023, two-thirds primarily from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. In Massachusetts, the Department of Public Health estimates the death toll at 2,125. So many have perished, a study by the RAND Corporation found that 42% of Americans know someone who has died from a drug-related death.
For years, drug addiction was seen as a crime that was solvable by incarceration. But over the years, scientific study has found that drug addiction is a brain disorder that needs to be treated like any other disease. The Into Light Project website includes a quote about the connection between science and art from Dr.
Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a research psychiatrist whose work was instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a brain disorder. “Science and art are not often thought of together in tandem, but the intersection of neuroscience to understand how the brain changes due to substance use and addiction and art to remind us of our shared humanity provides a powerful way to help alleviate deep-rooted stigma and inaccurate perceptions,” Volkow said. “While scientific evidence can build a case with evidence and data, the emotional connection experienced through art can be an even stronger argument for changed perceptions on addiction and overdose,” she said.
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