V&A Dundee has become the latest UK institution to cut ties with the billionaire Sackler family over its alleged role in the US opioid crisis.
The museum took down signs with the Sackler name last month, with a separate sign in the Oak Room removed in September last year.
Ahead of opening in September 2018, V&A Dundee received a £500,000 gift from the Sackler Trust. It has not returned the donation.
The Sackler family owned Purdue Pharma, the maker of addictive painkiller OxyContin. The story has been documented in the 2021 Disney+ drama Dopesick, and explored in the recent Netflix fictionalised show Painkiller, starring Matthew Broderick, Uzo Aduba and Taylor Kitsch.
A V&A Dundee spokeswoman told the BBC: “Along with many other cultural organisations in the UK and abroad, V&A Dundee has removed signage relating to the Sackler Trust.
“It was agreed by V&A Dundee’s board to remove the final piece of Sackler Trust crediting in August 2023.”
“V&A Dundee, like other organisations who have removed crediting, is not in talks to return the historic capital support received for the creation of the museum, which were made before V&A Dundee opened in 2018.”
Artwashing in cultural institutions
London’s V&A removed the Sackler name from its walls last year, joining UK museums including the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Design Museum, the British Museum and Tate.
The Louvre in Paris was the first major institution to cut the Sackler name from a wing in 2019. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum have also dropped the family’s name.
Meanwhile, more than 80 artists, museum directors, writers, researchers and climate activists are calling on the British Museum to remove BP’s name from its lecture theatre after the oil and gas company reported profits of £2 billion for the second quarter of this year.
Images courtesy of V&A
