Glossary

The language of public art, in plain terms: from commissioning policy to what actually goes on the map.

A

Accession: The formal act of adding an artwork to a collection's permanent inventory: the point at which a city or institution takes on responsibility for documenting, maintaining, and insuring the piece.
Anti-graffiti coating: A clear protective layer applied over a mural or sculpture so tags can be cleaned off without damaging the artwork underneath.
Art trail: A linked series of artworks, often sculptures or murals, arranged along a walkable or bikeable route and designed to be experienced in sequence.
Artist-in-residence: A program that embeds an artist in a community, institution, or city department for a set period, supporting new work made in and about that place.
Audio tour: A narrated companion to a route or collection: short audio stories, keyed to each stop, that visitors play on their own phone as they walk.

C

Call for artists: A public invitation to artists to apply for a commission or opportunity, setting out the project, site, budget, eligibility, timeline, and how submissions will be judged.
Civic art: Artwork commissioned by or for government (city halls, courthouses, parks, bridges), historically emphasizing shared ideals and the dignity of public institutions.
Collection management: The ongoing work of documenting, maintaining, and making decisions about a body of artworks: from accession records and condition reports to conservation schedules and public access.
Commission: An agreement to create a new artwork for a specific place, budget, and purpose, rather than purchasing an existing piece. Most public art enters the world this way.
Community engagement: The practice of involving residents in shaping a public artwork or program: from consultation on themes and sites to co-creation of the work itself.
Condition report: A dated record of an artwork's physical state (materials, damage, wear, past repairs) used as the baseline for maintenance and conservation decisions.
Conservation: The specialized care that keeps artworks stable and legible over time (from routine cleaning to structural repair), guided by professional standards and the artist's intent.
Creative placemaking: An approach to community development that puts arts and culture at the centre of how a neighbourhood plans, builds, and understands itself: part of the strategy, not decoration added after.
Cultural asset mapping: The process of systematically identifying and cataloguing a community's cultural resources (artworks, venues, organizations, traditions) so they can be planned for, invested in, and shared.
Cultural plan: A municipality's long-range strategy for arts and culture: what it will fund, build, program, and protect over the coming years, and how it will know whether any of it worked.
Cultural tourism: Travel motivated by a place's arts, heritage, and creative life: museums and festivals, but also the murals, monuments, and neighbourhoods that give a city its particular character.

D

Deaccession: The formal removal of an artwork from a collection because it has deteriorated beyond repair, no longer fits its site, or its continued display can no longer be justified.

F

Fabrication: The physical production of an artwork (casting, welding, printing, carving) often carried out by specialized studios working from the artist's designs.
Freedom of panorama: A copyright rule in many countries that lets anyone photograph and share images of artworks and buildings permanently installed in public places.

G

Ghost sign: A faded, hand-painted advertisement surviving on the brick of an older building, a remnant of early-twentieth-century signwriting that many cities now document and value as heritage.
Graffiti: Unsanctioned writing or images applied to surfaces in public view, a category that runs from simple tagging to elaborate lettering styles carrying a half-century of subculture.

H

Honorarium: A fee paid to artists for preliminary work (a concept proposal, an interview, a maquette) recognizing that developing ideas is real labour even when the commission ultimately goes to someone else.

I

Installation art: Artwork conceived as an environment or situation rather than a discrete object, built for a specific space and often engaging light, sound, movement, or the viewer's own path through it.
Interpretive signage: The plaques, panels, and labels that tell visitors what an artwork is, who made it, and why it's here: the difference between passing an object and meeting it.

K

Kinetic sculpture: Sculpture with moving parts (driven by wind, water, motors, or the viewer) in which motion itself is part of the composition.

L

Land art: Art made by shaping the land itself (earthworks, stone arrangements, planted forms) usually at landscape scale and inseparable from its site.
Legal wall: A wall where painting is expressly permitted (no commission, no curation) giving writers and muralists a sanctioned place to work in public.

M

Maquette: A scale model or study of a proposed artwork, made so selection panels, engineers, and the artist can judge the idea in three dimensions before anything is fabricated.
Memorial: An artwork or structure created to keep the memory of a person, group, or event present in public life. Remembrance is its explicit purpose.
Monument: A structure or artwork erected to commemorate a person, event, or idea at civic scale, built to fix a version of history in permanent, public form.
Moral rights: An artist's legal rights in the integrity and attribution of their work, separate from copyright ownership, which can make it unlawful to alter, mutilate, or misattribute an artwork even after it has been sold.
Mosaic: An artwork assembled from small pieces of tile, glass, or stone set into mortar: one of the most durable media in public art, which is why examples survive from antiquity.
Mural: A painting or applied artwork made directly on a wall or other permanent surface, usually at architectural scale. Murals are often the most visible and most photographed pieces in a city's public art collection.
Mural festival: An event that produces many murals in a compressed window, days or weeks, pairing local and visiting artists with donated walls, and turning the painting itself into public programming.

O

Open civic data: Public-sector datasets, including many cities' public art registries, published for anyone to use, build on, and redistribute.

P

Percent for art: A policy that sets aside a fixed share of a capital construction budget, commonly one percent, to commission public artwork as part of the project.
Placemaking: The practice of shaping public spaces around the people who use them, often with art, programming, and design that give a place an identity of its own.
Plop art: A dismissive nickname for public sculpture that lands in a plaza with no relationship to its surroundings: art dropped from above rather than grown from a place.
Provenance: The documented history of an artwork, who made it, who has owned it, and how it came to be where it is: the chain of records that establishes authenticity and legal title.
Public art: Artwork in the public realm: murals, sculptures, installations, and monuments that anyone can experience without a ticket or an invitation, usually commissioned for or donated to a shared space.
Public art master plan: A strategic document that sets a public art program's direction over five to ten years: priority sites, funding mechanisms, selection processes, equity goals, and how the collection will be cared for.
Public art program: The standing municipal or institutional structure (staff, policy, budget) through which public art is commissioned, maintained, and managed, rather than delivered as one-off projects.
Public realm: The shared, publicly accessible spaces of a city (streets, squares, parks, waterfronts) where public life, and public art, actually happen.

R

Relief: Sculpture that projects from a flat background rather than standing free, from shallow bas-relief to deeply undercut high relief, common on building façades, monuments, and doors.
Request for proposals (RFP): A call that asks artists to submit a specific concept for the project (design, budget, timeline) so the selection panel chooses both the artist and the artwork at once.
Request for qualifications (RFQ): A call that asks artists for examples of past work, experience, and approach, not a new design, so a shortlist can be chosen before anyone is asked to develop concepts.

S

Sculpture: Three-dimensional artwork (carved, cast, welded, assembled, or built), the oldest and still the most common form of public art.
Sculpture garden: A landscaped outdoor space designed for the display of sculpture, where the grounds and the works are curated together as a single experience.
Selection panel: The group convened to choose an artist or artwork for a commission: typically artists, arts professionals, community members, and stakeholders from the site.
Self-guided tour: A curated route visitors follow on their own schedule (no guide, no group), usually with a map and a short story about each stop along the way.
Site-specific art: Artwork conceived for one particular place (its scale, history, sightlines, and community) such that moving it would change or destroy its meaning.
Statue: A sculpted figure (usually a person or animal, typically life-size or larger) most often made to honour or commemorate its subject.
Street art: Imagery made in public space outside official channels (wheat-pastes, stencils, murals, sticker art), rooted in graffiti culture but generally aimed at the passing public rather than at other writers.

T

Temporary public art: Work installed for a defined period, weeks to a couple of years, letting a city take risks, test sites, and program change into its public spaces.

W

Wayfinding: The signs, maps, and environmental cues that help people orient themselves and navigate from one place to the next.