The scraps of paper swirled through the Guggenheim Museum in New York on Saturday night like confetti, thrown from an upper walkway into the central rotunda before floating to the ground.

Designed to look like prescription slips for OxyContin, the powerful opioid painkiller, they were part of the latest protest targeting cultural institutions that accept donations from members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug.

Education facilities at the Guggenheim, including a theater and an exhibition gallery, are housed inside the 8,200-square-foot Sackler Center for Arts Education, identified by the museum as “a gift of the Mortimer D. Sackler Family.”

The cloud of white slips, created by a group founded by the photographer Nan Goldin, was a response to a recently disclosed statement by Richard Sackler, the son of a Purdue founder, who said years ago that OxyContin’s launch would be “followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition.”