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This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross.

When my guest Nan Golden started taking her photographs to galleries back in the late 1970s,

the photos were considered too transgressive, too raw, too weird.

But they were photos of her friends, people who were considered social outcasts,

like drag queens and other queer people and people in the underground art and music scene.

She took pictures of them at parties, at home, alone in bed or having sacks.

She captured intimacy and despair.

Over time, her work was acknowledged as groundbreaking and was added to the permanent collections

of major museums, including the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Those were some of the museums she targeted when she led a campaign to get art institutions

to take down the Sackler family name and stop accepting their money.

The Sackler's founded Purdue Pharma, the company infamous for manufacturing oxycontin

and deceptively marketing it in ways that led to the opioid epidemic.

The Sackler's made large philanthropic donations to many museums, often getting a wing or wings

named after the family in return.

To Golden, it was a way of laundering blood money.

She founded the group Payne, an acronym for Prescription Addiction Intervention Now,

which led anti-sackler dions and other protests at museums.

Those protests were a major factor in getting institutions like the Met, the Guggenheim,

and the Louvre, which also showed her work, to remove the Sackler name,

...