DEIA Key Accomplishments & Objectives

We are in service to our communities. We remain steadfast in our commitment to be a place for scholarly study, creative play, reflection, and joy for all audiences. Our continuing efforts to center the voices of our diverse communities guide our work and affirm our identity as Philadelphia’s art museum.

Continuing DEIA Commitment

Authentically engage and collaborate with our communities in the development of exhibitions, education programs, and other initiatives.

Key Accomplishments to Date

• Land Acknowledgment with federally recognized indigenous Lenape communities and related educational workshops for museum staff.
• Elegy: Lament in the 20th Century and its formative work with community advisors to sustain collaborative exhibition and program development.
• Reduced admission for many underrepresented groups such as students, EBT Access Card holders, and families.
• “Art-ish” engagement model in collaboration with the PMA Young Friends highlighting local artists, entertainers, and musicians with a focus on BIPOC representation and audience diversity.
• Chef-in-Residence program, in collaboration with Constellation Culinary Group, which highlights local chefs from underrepresented communities each month to amplify diverse perspectives in culinary art.
• Tell Us visitor surveys that demonstrate areas that need improvement, and help meet visitor expectations and needs.
• External Partnership audit to help the museum build a more complete picture of the work we have done to build relationships in the past and inform our external engagement strategies in the future.
• Community Spotlight initiative to deepen authentic relationships with community organizations, grounded in the core values of the museum’s DEIA Statement of Principles.
• Support for various museum departmental committees to engage diverse stakeholders (e.g., the African American Collections Committee’s Chat and Chew series, and the South Asian Committee’s Storied Stone reception).
• Commencement of a two-year grant-funded initiative supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to develop an audience-driven digital storytelling practice that meets the needs and interests of the local Philadelphia community, especially communities of color.
• PMA Stories Blog, which regularly features commissioned posts by local artists and community members.

Objectives

In-Progress

1. Reimagine curatorial practice to incorporate identified community needs and relevant data from historically underrepresented communities into exhibition development.
2. Form a cross-departmental Exhibition Working Group to facilitate broader internal contributions to exhibition idea development.

Upcoming/Next Steps

1. Align programming goals with DEIA core values and prioritize relevant audience and community data that centers historically underrepresented communities.
2. Continue to deepen our relationships with underrepresented stakeholders across Philadelphia to build trustworthiness and encourage community participation in exhibition and program development.
3. Create new service opportunities that are responsive to community needs to authentically build presence in Philadelphia neighborhoods.
4. Conduct listening sessions and focus groups to solicit community feedback regarding issues facing residents across Philadelphia’s neighborhoods, and incorporate those learnings to enhance the museum experience and organizational citizenship.

We are attendant to our institutional culture. Our commitment to inclusive excellence and institutional equity is rooted in wellness. It shapes how we engage and remediate the harmful legacy of discriminatory and exclusive past practices and invites new opportunities to do our present work differently.

Continuing DEIA Commitment(s)

Cultivate a culture of belonging and inclusion whereby staff, management, volunteers, and trustees better reflect the diversity of Philadelphia and the global communities we serve.

Increase the number of diverse companies with which we collaborate, including MWBE, LGBTQIA+, and veteran-owned and disabled-owned businesses.

Key Accomplishments to Date

• PMA Inclusive Hiring Guide to provide search committees with resources needed for more effective talent acquisition and mitigation of implicit and unconscious bias throughout the hiring process.
• Deliberate focus on diversifying product mix in museum retail outlets to include local, MWBE, LGBTQIA+, and veteran-owned and disabled-owned vendors.
• Online Staff Portal to support wellness by increasing awareness of various employee benefits, including free admission for guests and discounts on programing, gift membership, and parking.
• Regular review of applicant pool data to assess candidate pools meet appropriate standards for inclusive hiring.
• Institution-wide anti-racism workshops in 2020–21 with external experts that engaged Board, management, staff, and volunteers. Critical conversations and activities were designed to raise awareness and explore how to change or adapt museum policies and practices to be more equitable and inclusive.
• Establishment of the Art Bridges Fellowship in Conservation at PMA beginning in summer 2022. The fellowship’s primary goal is to improve diverse representation in the museum professions.
• Implementation of annual museum equity audits across divisions to sharpen our focus on the resources and actions needed to achieve our DEIA institutional objectives.
• Comprehensive anti-harassment and core value alignment training for Board of Trustees, museum management, and staff.
• PMA Remote Work Pilot Program, implemented in 2022, to center employee wellness and create opportunities to enhance employee performance and reimagine operational excellence.

Objectives

In-Progress

1. Regular review of PMA Employee Handbook to ensure museum policies and practices center wellness.
2. Continue to identify and confront practices that harm efforts to build a more representationally diverse workforce in ongoing Inclusive Hiring Workshops.
3. Center wellness and harm remediation as critical components of ongoing museum enterprise risk assessment process.
4. Deploy comprehensive anti-harassment and core value alignment training for Board of Trustees, museum management, and staff to embed our institutional values in policy and practice, support internal stakeholder wellness, and strengthen leader responsibilities.
5. Assess and evaluate learning management software solutions for future implementation to support employee wellness.
6. Explore innovative and equitable ways to acknowledge staff and community contributions in exhibitions, publications, and special events.
7. Identify opportunities to improve exhibition promotion and marketing to historically underrepresented communities, including the increased use of donor development assets (e.g., special access to member events, corporate sponsorships, opening events, etc.) to broaden audience appeal.
8. Build the infrastructure for the Office of DEIA and expand its resource capacity for data collection, community engagement, additional staffing, and technology.
9. Improve our internal communication with new DEIA-focused communication assets, including new digital content and resources; new websites; and contributions to SMT bulletin, Art Matters, and other outlets.
10. Implement baseline museum-wide efforts to secure services and goods from diverse suppliers (MWBE, LGBTQIA+, and veteran-owned and disabled-owned businesses) through the annual museum equity audit process.
11. Revise our RFP and vendor contracting forms and practices to improve institutional support for vendor and supplier diversity.
12. Regularly solicit feedback from Board of Trustees, management, staff, and volunteers to shape future DEIA training and development offerings.

Upcoming/Next Steps

1. Construct consistent guidelines for mentoring young professionals and students at the museum to support identity affirmation and promote a sense of belonging.
2. Expand our training and development strategy and support wellness through the creation of new employee resource groups, learning communities, innovation teams, and advisory committees.
3. Establish regular bi-annual rotation of employee engagement and employee satisfaction surveys to collect data from internal stakeholders.
4. Develop alignment between museum fellowship and internship program recruitment and diverse talent acquisition goals at the museum.

We are inspired by our world-renowned collection. It serves as our most powerful asset through which to present more full and authentic stories that capture imagination and reflect the diversity of humanity.  Our commitment to its continued care, expansion, and development is critical to demonstrating inclusive excellence.

Continuing DEIA Commitment

Expand our collection to include more works by underrepresented artists, including but not limited to artists of color, women artists, and those who identify as LGBTQIA+.

Enhance the presence and contributions of historically underrepresented stakeholders, artists, and their works throughout our galleries and our various platforms.

Key Accomplishments to Date

• Establishment of Collection Publications Advisory Committee to assist in strategic alignment of collection-based publications strategies with DEIA values.
• Purchases of works by African American artists accounted for 68% of funds spent by the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs on American art and 86% of works acquired in 2021.
• Exhibitions featuring works by artists of color, including New Grit: Art & Philly Now; Senga Nengudi: Topologies; Emma Amos: Color Odyssey; Elegy: Lament in the 20th Century; Martine Syms: Neural Swamp; and the traveling exhibition Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love.
• Black Artists Guide, established by Advocates for Black Representation (formerly the African American Art Working Group), for visitors to highlight works by Black artists on view within our collection.
• The activist artist, Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, China) was prominently featured in the two successful public programs: In Conversation: Migration and Ai Weiwei; and Ai Weiwei and James Lally on Copying in Chinese Art followed by a major acquisition of his works by the museum.
• Reinstallation of the Early American galleries to tell more full and authentic stories of the global diversity of colonial history through art.
• Development of the PMA Content Plan grounded in DEIA values and the diverse perspectives of an institution-wide advisory group.
• Publication of Storied Stone: Reframing the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s South Indian Temple Hall and Martine Syms: Neural Swamp.
• Development of Inclusive Language Guidelines as part of the museum’s Editorial Style Guide, and launch of a new working group focused on bias remediation in our online collections.
• Biographies of 106 Black artists represented in the museum’s collection and archives to update Wikidata records, written and published by Library and Archives.

Objectives

In-Progress

1. Continue to support curatorial departments with regular collection audits of the current number of (and resources allocated towards acquiring) works by historically underrepresented artists.
2. Support the work of the Library and Archives Art Information Commons project to expand access to the collection and build more diverse and inclusive art information for research and engagement.
3. Increase diversity of museum object images, publications, and web-based object labels to expand access to and engagement of the online collection.

Upcoming/Next Steps

1. Work with curatorial department heads to raise awareness among departmental committees of the institutional objective to expand collection through acquisitions of works by historically underrepresented artists.
2. Center bias remediation in ongoing collection audits to inform more inclusive and equitable practices in interpretation, gallery rotation, and future reinstallations.
3. Under the guidance of the incoming Director and Deputy Director for Collections and Exhibitions, reimagine exhibition proposal, management, and scheduling practices to ensure they advance the institution’s mission and reflect PMA’s commitment to institutional equity and inclusive excellence.