The Sackler Wing (1978) is located at

The Met Fifth Avenue The Met Fifth Avenue is the primary museum building for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, United States. The building is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile, New York, Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park ...

, the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

's flagship location in New York City. Designed by

Kevin Roche Eamonn Kevin Roche (June 14, 1922 – March 1, 2019) was an Irish-born American Pritzker Prize-winning architect. He was responsible for the design/master planning for over 200 built projects in both the U.S. and abroad. These projects i ...

and located to the north of the museum's original building, the wing was built to house the

Temple of Dendur The Temple of Dendur (Dendoor in the 19th century) is a Roman Egyptian religious structure originally located in Tuzis (later Dendur), Nubia about south of modern Aswan. Around 23 BCE, Emperor Augustus commissioned the temple dedicated to the E ...

, brought from Egypt to New York. The wing was

named after A namesake is a person, geographic location, or other entity bearing the name of another. History The word is first attested around 1635, and probably comes from the phrase "for one's name's sake", which originates in English Bible translations ...

the

Sackler family The Sackler family is an American family who founded and owned the pharmaceutical companies Purdue Pharma and Mundipharma. Purdue Pharma, and some members of the family, have faced lawsuits regarding overprescription of addictive pharmaceutical d ...

, associated with the

Purdue Pharma Purdue Pharma L.P., formerly the Purdue Frederick Company, is an American privately held pharmaceutical company founded by John Purdue Gray. It was owned principally by members of the Sackler family as descendants of Mortimer and Raymond Sackler ...

company accused of fuelling the

opioid crisis The opioid epidemic, also referred to as the opioid crisis, is the rapid increase in the overuse, misuse/abuse, and overdose deaths attributed either in part or in whole to the class of drugs opiates/opioids since the 1990s. It includes the sign ...

in the US. In 2021 the name Sackler was removed from several elements of the Met Museum, but no substitute name for this wing was proposed. Maps of the Met Museum show in 2023 no name for this particular wing, while the related one situated at the south side, The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, remains well identified. The space within the Wing housing the temple is just ''Gallery 131''.

History

The addition of the wing was part of a comprehensive architectural renewal plan for the Museum by then director of the Met, Thomas Hoving. Several additions were planned, with different donors, but in order to house the Egyptian temple of Dendur, Hoving calculated that $3.5 million was needed.

Arthur Sackler Arthur Mitchell Sackler (August 22, 1913 – May 26, 1987) was an American psychiatrist and marketer of pharmaceuticals whose fortune originated in medical advertising and trade publications. He was also a philanthropist and art collector. He was ...

volunteered that amount in 1967. In the negotiations that followed, names for several galleries and wings were assigned to the Sacklers, with personal mentions of the brothers Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond, each mentioned with the letters “ M.D.” following his name in every signage associated. It was also stipulated that the money would come personally from the three doctors. However, the payment of the donation was to be paid over twenty years, and the city "ended up chipping in $1.4 million", according to journalist Patrick Radden Keefe in his book ''

Empire of Pain ''Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty'' is a 2021 book by Patrick Radden Keefe. The book examines the history of the Sackler family, including the founding of Purdue Pharma, their role in the marketing of pharmaceuticals, a ...

''. The plan was approved in 1971. The Sackler Wing was complete by the end of 1978, and the rest in 1991. All directed by Roche's architectural firm, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates. The launch of a new exhibit was prepared for opening of the Wing, ''The Treasures of King Tut'', showing objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun. A show by choreographer

Martha Graham Martha Graham (May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991) was an American modern dancer and choreographer. Her style, the Graham technique, reshaped American dance and is still taught worldwide. Graham danced and taught for over seventy years. She wa ...

was also commissioned for the opening by the Sacklers. Another element of the extension was The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, with the Andre Meyer Galleries above, which was added to the south. The adjacent corners were completed by the respective additions of the new American Wing and the Wallace Galleries for Twentieth Century Art. When Kevin Roche died in 2019, The Sackler Wing was praised as one of his most notable achievements. Roche was a recipient of the

Pritzker Architecture Prize The Pritzker Architecture Prize is an international architecture award presented annually "to honor a living architect or architects whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produ ...

, and it is customary that the presentation ceremonies of this prize pay homage to works done by previous laureates of the prize; following this tradition, the ceremony for laureate Ieoh Ming Pei in 1983 took place in the Sackler Wing. The Sackler Wing hosted, until the name was dropped in 2021, several galleries also named after the Sackler family: The Sackler Wing Galleries (galleries 223–232), The Temple of Dendur in The Sackler Wing (Gallery 131) and The Sackler Gallery for Egyptian Art (Gallery 130). In March 2018, the artist Nan Goldin and around 100 fellow activists of the

PAIN Pain is a distressing feeling often caused by intense or damaging stimuli. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, ...

group, threw pill bottles into the moat that is in the Wing, to protest sponsorship by the family that owned Purdue Pharma, producer and marketer of the opioid Oxycontin, associated to the opioid epidemic. PAIN's campaign, which continued in other art institutions associated to the Sackler name, was finally successful: The Met announced in May 2019, that it would reject further contributions from the Sacklers; and in 2021, finally, the name was also dropped in a decision mutually agreed among the Museum and the descendants of Mortimer Sackler and Raymond Sackler. No substitute name for the wing has been proposed.

Gallery

File:The Temple of Dendur MET DP244278.jpg, The

and Egyptian sculptures hosted in Gallery 131. File:Met Egyptian Collection.png, Detail of the moat and windows. File:Central Park New York August 2013 002.jpg, Exterior view of the Wing. File:The Sacker Wing name visible in the Dendur temple gallery at the Met, 2017 (cropped).jpg, The Sacker Wing name visible at the entrance, in 2017.

References

{{Reflist Metropolitan Museum of Art Sackler family Roche-Dinkeloo buildings