New York’s famed Metropolitan Museum of Art is going to remove the name of arguably its most controversial donor groups – the billionaire Sackler family – from its galleries.
The news comes in the wake of leading members of the US family, one of America’s richest, being blamed for fueling the deadly opioids crisis in America with the aggressive selling of the family company’s prescription narcotic painkiller, OxyContin.
The Met, which overlooks Central Park and houses some of the most famous and precious art works and antiquities in existence, announced on Thursday that it had reached an agreement with the descendants of two of the Sackler brothers behind OxyContin that seven named exhibition spaces at the institution would no longer carry the Sackler name.
This includes the Temple of Dendur exhibition space, the ancient Egyptian temple, described by the Met as one of the iconic and most beloved works of art it houses, which is displayed in the Sackler Wing.
The museum’s decision follows several years of hundreds of civil lawsuits and civil and criminal investigations into some members of the Sackler family who own the Connecticut-based company Purdue Pharma, which makes the powerful painkiller OxyContin.
A New York bankruptcy judge in September approved a settlement by Purdue Pharma, including about $4.5bn from the company’s billionaire Sackler family owners, even though the decision is still being challenged in court and provoked outrage from many critics and campaigners.
Some wanted to see those family members prevented from being shielded from further civil liability and also hoped some Sacklers would end up in prison, the likelihood of which faded when Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to three criminal charges last year and paid $8bn in fines and damages.
The Met announced that the families of the late Mortimer Sackler and the late Raymond Sackler “have mutually agreed to take this action” in order to allow the museum to further its “core mission”.
A statement from the descendants of the two brothers said: “Our families have always strongly supported The Met, and we believe this to be in the best interest of the Museum and the important mission that it serves.”
The statement added: “The earliest of these gifts were made almost 50 years ago, and now we are passing the torch to others who might wish to step forward to support the Museum.”
Dan Weiss, president and chief executive of the museum, said that “the Sacklers have been among our most generous supporters” and referred to “this gracious gesture” by the family.
At the height of the legal battle against the owners of Purdue Pharma in 2019, members of the Sackler family were being sued by multiple American cities, counties and states, with allegations in civil lawsuits including that “eight people in a single family made the choices that caused much of the US opioid epidemic” – via a “deadly, deceptive … illegal scheme” to flood the US with Purdue’s OxyContin.
The American art photographer Nan Goldin devised and led a direct action protest at the Met in 2018 against Sackler philanthropy. She later took protests to institutions including the Guggenheim in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, which had all benefited from Sackler money and displayed the family name, demanding that arts and academic institutions stop taking their dollars and also take down the name.
The Met was slow to respond but later followed other institutions in saying it would no longer take Sackler gifts and now, ultimately, that it will remove the Sackler name from its premises.
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