The Museum’s Corporate Partners Program is comprised of area businesses that support the Museum through corporate donations. The leaders of these companies recognize the importance of partnering with an institution that culturally enriches and significantly impacts the region’s economy. The contributions of the Corporate Partners enable the Museum to continue and expand key initiatives in three primary areas:

Education

For over three decades, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been a renowned national leader in museum education. The Division of Education's award-winning programs for visitors of all ages, communities, schools, and people with disabilities are widely imitated. New technologies extend the reach and power of these offerings through initiatives such as distance learning, Internet outreach, and home education software.

• Helping Visitors Enjoy Art
  The Division of Education creates materials that help people make sense of art through interpretive sources such as labels, brochures, interactive kiosks, multimedia presentations, and audio tours. The staff also designs programs—including classes, symposia, lectures, concerts, school tours, teacher workshops, studio art classes, and creative hands-on projects—to provide a memorable learning experience for visitors and students of all ages. The Museum has offered award-winning programs for audiences with disabilities since 1970.
• Promoting the Study of the Visual Arts
  The study of visual arts is a rich resource for improving education. The Museum hosts more than one hundred school-based art education programs. Each year, staff members instruct tens of thousands of students from the Greater Philadelphia and tri-state area school districts.
• The Museum Online
  Distance learning, videoconferencing, and online education programs offer an entire range of experiences that meet local and national curriculum standards and that are appropriate to several disciplines: art, history, language arts, foreign languages, and multicultural studies.
• Accessible Programs
  A variety of services and programs provide access to the collections for people with a broad range of disabilities. Workshops and art instruction, hands-on tours, three-dimensional diagrams of two-dimensional objects, detailed audio descriptions, sign language interpretation, and outreach programs to nursing homes, hospitals, and prisons are available.

Conservation

The Museum’s talented team of conservators is world-renowned for its outstanding abilities and commitment to preserve the works of art in the Museum’s collections. Staff members use a variety of methods in their work—from traditional craft to sophisticated analytical instrumentation—to stabilize, protect, and conserve or restore the art as well as to examine it for original materials or alterations due to physiochemical and other causes. The conservators’ treatment work and research covers the very wide range of materials and techniques included in the Museum’s collections.

The Department of Conservation has a very successful, longstanding record of training graduate students and postgraduate fellows for the conservation field. The department’s education outreach has regularly involved middle school, high school, and college classes. With its skilled staff and the city’s only analytical laboratory devoted to art conservation, the department has served as a fundamental conservation resource for local institutions, such as Independence National Historical Park, the Office of Arts and Culture, and historical societies.

Technology

The Museum uses technology in virtually every area of its operation, including education and conservation. One of the Museum’s major goals is to have an image of every work in its permanent collections visible online. Such a comprehensive database will serve as a virtual library for the curators, educators, and conservators. The Museum has substantially expanded and improved its computer infrastructure and web presence.

Technology initiatives benefit the public at large in the following ways:

• Distance learning, which brings the Museum to students across the country and the world via electronic art classrooms
• Online ticket purchasing
• Art Talk; phone conferences for housebound seniors and art enthusiasts with disabilities
• The Museum website, philamuseum.org, for information about Museum programs, exhibitions, and objects
• Virtual reality, which allows visitors to handle and view art through multimedia technology
• Wi-Fi access
• Podcasts of Museum lectures and programs available through the website and on iTunes
• The Wachovia Education Resource Center, which provides teacher training and online access to ARTstor, a worldwide resource for art images and documents

For more information, please contact Corporate Partners by phone at (215) 684-7760 or by e-mail at .