Last Thursday, 100 Harvard students and PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) activists staged a die-in at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, demanding the removal of Sackler’s name from the institution’s walls.
The demonstration took place one day after the screening of Laura Poitras’s Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and Bloodshed (2022) in Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, after which Goldin spoke to the audience via Zoom. The film documented Goldin’s engagement with members the Sackler family’s troubled pharmaceutical legacy, a campaign which has persuaded major museums and institutions in Europe and the United States to sever their ties with the Sackler name. Although Goldin first organised an anti-Sackler protest at Harvard’s Sackler Museum five years ago, the institution remains unresponsive to the demand and is now the last institution in the United States yet to have disassociated itself from the Sackler name.
