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

The Victoria and Albert Museum has bowed to growing pressure to rename key areas of its Kensington site, the Observer has learned, as it drops controversial ties with the Sackler family, benefactors descended from the American makers of addictive opioid prescription drugs.

The move marks another victory for the campaign group Sackler Pain, which staged a dramatic public protest at the gallery in November 2019.

The group, led by the American artist Nan Goldin, argued that donations from members of the family that founded the now bankrupt Purdue Pharma, makers of the addictive OxyContin painkiller, were a stain on those cultural institutions that accepted them.

The V&A follows the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum as cultural organisations which have removed the Sackler name from prominent wings and galleries that were built with financial support from family members or their charitable foundations.

Some Sackler descendants did speak out against the trade in opioids. The branch of the family descended from Arthur have also said their charitable donations were not funded from OxyContin sales.

But public pressure to distance themselves from the family caused trustees to look again at their wealthy donors. The V&A said this weekend its policies on financial support, which they regard as rigorous, are unchanged.

In Britain, the National Portrait Gallery became the first major art institution to turn down a Sackler grant. This March, the British Museum renamed all galleries and endowments that carried the names of Raymond and Beverly Sackler, who donated to the institution between the 1990s and 2013.

Goldin, known for her 1986 book and photography show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, began a string of colourful protests as she recovered from her own addiction to OxyContin, prescribed in 2014 for tendinitis in her wrist.

A number of leading institutions still display the Sackler name, including Harvard University, which has an Arthur M Sackler museum.