V&A drops financial ties with Sackler family over links with opioids

theguardian.com:

Campaigners calling for the name Sackler to be dropped from cultural landmarks are celebrating this weekend. Their smiles mark five years of demonstrations and dramatic stunts as another major arts institution – London’s Victoria and Albert Museum – takes down signs acknowledging the financial contribution from this wealthy family.

The museum is dropping it controversial ties with the Sackler family, descendants of US makers of addictive opioid prescription drugs. It’s a victory for the campaign group Sackler P.A.I.N, which staged a dramatic public protest at the gallery in November 2019. The group, led by American artist Nan Goldin, argued that donations from the family that founded now-bankrupt Purdue Pharma, maker of the painkiller OxyContin, were a moral stain on cultural institutions that accepted them.

A museum spokesperson told the Observer: “The V&A and the family of the late Dr Mortimer D Sackler have mutually agreed that the V&A’s Centre for Arts Education and its Exhibition Road courtyard will no longer carry the Sackler name. Dame Theresa Sackler was a trustee of the V&A between 2011 and 2019, and we are immensely grateful for her service to the V&A over the years. We have no current plans to rename the spaces.”

Signs that once directed V&A visitors to the arts education hub and adorned the walls of the courtyard designed by architect Amanda Levete have gone, as the popular museum of design and decorative arts finally jettisons links with the opioid market.

The V&A follows the National Gallery, Tate, National Portrait Gallery, British Museum and other London cultural organisations in removing the Sackler name from wings and galleries built with support from the family or their charitable foundations. The V&A’s