Guggenheim Museum Quietly Removes Sackler Name
New York's Guggenheim Museum is the latest art institution to remove the name of the Sackler family. Until last week, the Sacklers were honored as the namesakes of the institution’s Center for Arts Education. There was no public announcement at the time, but the name was quietly erased.
"The Guggenheim and the Mortimer D. Sackler family have agreed to rename the arts education center," Sara Fox, a museum spokeswoman, said in a statement today. "We believe this decision is in the best interest of the museum and the vital work it does."
The Sackler family made a fortune as owners of Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures pain medication OxyContin. Early March, they reached a deal to pay up to $6 billion in cash to resolve lawsuits alleging Purdue fueled the U.S. opioid epidemic.
The Guggenheim Museum has been the focus of protests by photographer Nan Goldin and her advocacy group Sackler P.A.I.N. because of the institution's association with the family. The group staged a die-in at the museum in 2019, unfurling anti-Sackler banners that proclaimed "take down their name" and listed statistics of opiod deaths in the United States.
"Direct action works," Goldin said in a statement, according to the New York Times. "Our group has fought for over four years to hold the family accountable in the cultural realm with focused, effective action, and with tremendous support from local groups that fought by our side."
The Guggenheim stopped accepting donations from the family in March 2019, a month after Goldin's protest at the museum. In recent years, numerous museums have announced they would stop accepting donations from the Sacklers, including the Lourve, Serpentine North Gallery (once the Serpentine Sackler Gallery), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, and London's National Portrait Gallery.
The Guggenheim, too, joins a long list of museums to get rid of the Sackler name—just this week, the National Gallery in London also announced its gallery Room 34 would no longer be named after the Sacklers. Notably, in December, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that the Sackler name would be removed from seven exhibition spaces, including the wing that houses the Dendur Temple, and in March of this year, the British Museum ended its 30-year relationship with the family.
There are still a few museums worldwide that bear the Sackler name, including the Sackler Courtyard at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
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