Serpentine Gallery shuns Sacklers after artist likens family to a ‘serial killer’
Hito Steyerl urged institutions to ‘pull together and start solving the problem’ by finding legal ways to sever ties with the family
London’s Serpentine Gallery will no longer take donations from the Sackler family after a major artist exhibiting at the institution slammed the family whose company, Purdue Pharma, is behind OxyContin, one of the painkillers at the center of the deadly US opioids crisis.
Artist Hito Steyerl’s show opened on Thursday at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, the space at the renowned institution that includes the name of the multi-billionaire family known for worldwide philanthropy to the arts and education, but which made its wealth from a pharmaceutical company now facing an avalanche of lawsuits in America over its addictive prescription opioid.