Founded in 1982, the Gallery is named after Arthur M. Sackler, who donated approximately 1,000 objects and $4 million to the building of the museum.

In 2018 the gallery was the target of protesters accusing the Sackler family of being a key contributor to the opioid epidemic in the United States.

During his visit, he announced that Japan would donate $1 million to the Smithsonian in order to assist in the building of an annex to the Freer to display Asian art.

[3] That same year, the United States Senate approved the Smithsonian Institution's request for $500,000 to build museums for Asian and African art on June 6.

[11] Groundbreaking took place on June 21, 1983, with participation by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, then Vice President George H. W. Bush and Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley.

In 1992, two exhibitions opened showcasing loaned and permanent collection objects: "Metalwork and Ceramics from Ancient Iran" and "Buddhist and Jain Sculpture from South Asia."

[33] In 2011, the Sackler indefinitely postponed an exhibition of artifacts from the Belitung shipwreck owing to possible collecting violations by the commercial organization which acquired the objects.

The exhibition was originally planned by the government of Singapore, which bought the objects for $32 million from a treasure hunting company.

[34][35] The Gallery has also curated and hosted exhibitions about the Mesopotamian art collection of the Louvre, the paintings of Chang Dai-chien, and photographs of orientalism and colonialism in India.

[46] The Department of Conservation and Scientific Research for both the Freer and Sackler Galleries was established as the first Smithsonian facility devoted to the use of scientific methods for the study of works of art and remains one of the few facilities in the United States that specializes in the conservation of Asian paintings.

In 1932, the Freer Gallery of Art hired a full-time Japanese restorer and established the East Asian Painting Conservation Studio.

The Technical Laboratory, and the first use of scientific methods for the study of art at the Smithsonian Institution, started in 1951 when the chemist Rutherford J. Gettens moved from the Fogg Museum at Harvard University to the Freer.

[47] Among the conservation projects that the Sackler Gallery has undertaken was a 2009 project where conservators used laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to explore the "fingerprints" of ancient Chinese gold objects from the Gallery.

[48] The Sackler presents lectures and symposia to the public with the Freer has copublished the art historical journal Artibus Asiae with the Museum Rietberg in Zürich since 1991.

In 1989, the Gallery hosted its first series of events, a two-month-long celebration of Persian art and culture sponsored in collaboration with the Foundation for Iranian Studies.

In 2011, Azar Nafisi and Dick Davis discussed the role of women in the Shahnameh in conjunction with an exhibition on the 1,000-year-old Persian poem.

[53] Together, alongside the Freer and the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Studies of Kyoto, the Sackler created the Shimada Prize.