Nan Goldin Takes Her Fight Against Opioids to the Sackler Wing of Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Artist Nan Goldin was joined by nearly a 100 people this weekend at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Sackler Wing. There to protest the Sackler family many of whom have amassed a fortune through Purdue Pharma, the privately-held company that developed and marketed OxyContin, Goldin and her fellow protestors threw empty pill bottles into the moat that surrounds the Temple of Dendur, the heart of the museum’s Egyptian wing.
The Guardian reports that the prescription labels normally attached to the ubiquitous orange bottles had been replaced with a label that read “prescribed to you by the Sackler Family.” Goldin’s protest is part of an ongoing fight against the Sacklers that she began in late January. In an Artforum essay Goldin—a photographer who rose to prominence in the mid-’80s after she published The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a nuanced look at sexuality, violence, and drug abuse—described her own recent addiction to opioids after the painkillers were prescribed to her following wrist surgery.