Hannah Gadsby Addresses Sackler Ties to Their Brooklyn Museum Show: ‘There’s a Problem with Money in the Art World’

Last month, the Brooklyn Museum announced that comedian Hannah Gadsby, whose 2018 Netflix special memorably skewered the male-centric art canon, had been tapped to co-curate an exhibition on Pablo Picasso. This week, Gadsby addressed a controversy trailing the upcoming show—the museum’s lingering ties to the infamous Sackler family. 

“I’m doing a show at the Brooklyn Museum. There’s one Sackler on the board [trustee emerita Elizabeth A. Sackler]. We vetted this. Apparently, they’ve separated their earning streams from the problematic one,” Gadsby told Variety. “I mean, take that with a grain of salt. Doesn’t matter what cultural institution you work with in America, you’re going to be working with billionaires and there’s not a billionaire on this planet that is not fucked up. It is just morally reprehensible.”

Gadsby, who uses they/them pronouns, added, “I was assured that they’d separated from the opioids strain. That’s where it lands. I don’t see it as a clean win-win. That’s for sure, but I’m not sure how to navigate this world.”

The show, titled “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” is set to feature nearly 100 works by women artists who, according to the museum, will examine Picasso’s “complicated legacy through a critical, contemporary, and feminist lens, even as it acknowledges his work’s transformative power and lasting influence.” The curators also include Catherine Morris, the Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

For decades, members of the Sackler family were among the world’s most active museum benefactors. They funded new wings and galleries, as well as endowed directorships and curatorships, at institutions worldwide. But in the last four years, the family has been the subject of intense criticism for its role in exacerbating the opioid epidemic in America through the aggressive marketing of the highly addictive painkiller Oxycontin, which is produced by Purdue Pharma. 

The pharmaceutical company was long operated by members of the Sackler family, several of whom have been individually sued over their alleged involvement in the public health crisis. In 2021 Purdue Pharma was formally dissolved. The family has denied wrongdoing.

Numerous major institutions, including the Louvre, Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have announced that they would no longer be accepting money from the Sackler Trust. Nan Goldin’s Academy Award–nominated documentary, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” chronicled her years-long campaign to divest New York museums from Sackler philanthropy.

The Brooklyn Museum, however, has maintained its relationship with Elizabeth A. Sackler, a historian and noted advocate for Native American and feminist causes. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, of which she is the chief benefactor, opened in 2007 and has since staged significant exhibitions dedicated to women artists, including the first US surveys of Zanele Muholi, Wangechi Mutu, and Ghada Amer. Sackler claims never to have been involved in the business operations of Purdue Pharma.

Elizabeth A. Sackler is not funding Gadsby’s upcoming show. The comedian, however, said that in general accepting philanthropy was a moral compromise. 

“This is the world we’ve built, particularly in the US and it’s like, how do you do anything here without corrupting yourself? I feel like it’s impossible. I feel sick about it,” they said. “Not just this particularly—but you go through the motions. Again, if you want to change the conversation, do you take yourself out of the conversation to change the conversation? It’s murky, isn’t it? I don’t have an answer. But also the exhibition is about Picasso and I really, really want to stick one up him.”

They continued: “There’s an elephant in the room [with Elizabeth A. Sackler], yeah. There’s a problem with money in the art world, generally. That also is part of my perspective on Picasso. Like, is he a hero, or is he just worth a lot of money?”