Where everything here came from.
We build guides to other people’s art. It would be strange to be careless about whose work is on our own site, so this page records what we used, what we made, and what isn’t ours to claim.
The artworks are not ours
Every sculpture, mural, and installation pictured on this site belongs to the person who made it. Photographing a work in a plaza transfers nothing: copyright stays with the artist or their estate, along with whatever moral rights apply where the piece stands.
Nothing here is a claim on a work, a license to reproduce one, or a suggestion that any artist is affiliated with us or endorses what we sell. The art is in the frame because it is part of the public landscape these guides are built for.
Where a caption identifies a piece, it cites what the source record actually supports — title, artist, year, and location when they are known — and stops there. When the maker isn’t recorded, we say the work is unattributed instead of guessing at a name.
Photography
The photographs come from public-domain collections rather than a stock subscription. Three institutions do most of the work:
- Wikimedia Commons
Contemporary public art photography — sculpture, murals, trails, and installations photographed where they stand.
- The J. Paul Getty Museum
Open-content holdings: historical artworks, antiquities, and archival photography.
- The National Gallery of Art
Open-access holdings: paintings, drawings, and design records.
Each image was released under CC0 or is otherwise in the public domain, and none of the three requires a credit line. We keep the rights metadata alongside the image library, re-check it when the library grows, and name the institutions here anyway.
One distinction is easy to get wrong, so it is worth stating: in that metadata, the photographer is whoever dedicated the photograph to the public domain. They are not the sculptor. A caption that credits the photographer as the artist misattributes the work, and we try hard not to do that.
Maps
The maps inside our product screenshots are drawn from OpenStreetMap data — © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License — served as vector tiles by Protomaps. The cartography itself, the colors and the choice of what to draw at which zoom, is ours.
Type and icons
The site is set in Inter, designed by Rasmus Andersson and released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. We self-host it from the official release, and the license travels with the file: read it here.
Interface icons are Material Symbols by Google, under the Apache License 2.0. The two share buttons at the end of an article use Simple Icons, released under CC0 1.0. Both arrive by way of Iconify.
What we made
The interface imagery is ours: screenshots and mockups of the guide and the catalog, the logo and wordmark, and the cover art on every article, which is generated at build time from the brand palette rather than photographed or licensed.
If something here is yours
If you made a work pictured on this site, or took one of these photographs, and you would rather it wasn’t here, email hey@civiccollection.com and we will take it down.
You don’t need to prove anything, cite a statute, or argue with us about what the license permits. Tell us which page and which image, and we will remove it. If we have a citation wrong instead — the wrong artist, a mangled title, a name we should have credited — tell us that and we will correct it.
For anything else, including how we handle these questions inside the guides we operate, get in touch.