The word Nan Goldin kept using to describe her presence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, one night in February, for a screening of an Oscar-nominated documentary about her life and work, was surreal. It wasn’t that Goldin, a renowned photographer since the 1980s, was new to art-world accolades. But All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a collaboration with Citizenfour director Laura Poitras, documents her crusade to get cultural institutions to cut ties with the Sackler family—the pharmaceutical dynasty that profited off America’s lethal opioid crisis. The film opens with a die-in that Goldin helped stage, in 2018, in the Met’s Sackler Wing.

Between then and now, the museum announced it would no longer accept donations …