Glossary

The language of public art, in plain terms.

A

Accession: The formal act of adding an artwork to a collection’s permanent inventory: the point at which the institution takes on responsibility for 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, setting out the project, site, budget, timeline, and how submissions will be judged.
Civic art: Artwork commissioned by or for government (city halls, courthouses, parks), 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 to condition reports and public access.
Commission: An agreement to create a new artwork for a specific place, budget, and purpose. 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 standards and the artist’s intent.
Creative placemaking: An approach to community development that puts arts and culture at the center of how a neighborhood plans, builds, and understands itself.
Cultural asset mapping: Systematically identifying and cataloging a community’s cultural resources (artworks, venues, organizations, traditions) so they can be planned for and shared.
Cultural plan: A municipality’s long-range strategy for arts and culture: what it will fund, build, program, and protect, 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 and neighborhoods that give a city its character.

D

Deaccession: The formal removal of an artwork from a collection when it has deteriorated beyond repair, no longer fits its site, or can no longer be justified on display.
Decommissioning: The planned end of an artwork's public display, covering its removal, the restoration of the site, and the disposition of the work itself.
Deinstallation: The physical act of taking an artwork down, including rigging, transport, and making the site safe, as distinct from the decision to remove it.

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 signwriting many cities now document as heritage.
Graffiti: Unsanctioned writing or images applied to surfaces in public view, 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 labor.

I

Installation art: Artwork conceived as an environment rather than a discrete object, built for a specific space, often engaging light, sound, movement, or the viewer’s path.
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 of a proposed artwork, made so selection panels, engineers, and the artist can judge the idea in three dimensions before fabrication.
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 rights in the integrity and attribution of their work, separate from copyright: altering or misattributing a piece can be unlawful even after sale.
Mosaic: An artwork assembled from small pieces of tile, glass, or stone set into mortar: one of public art’s most durable media, with examples surviving from antiquity.
Mural: A painting or applied artwork made directly on a wall, usually at architectural scale: often the most visible and photographed works in a city’s collection.
Mural festival: An event that produces many murals in days or weeks, pairing local and visiting artists with donated walls and turning the painting 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 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, how it came to be where it is): the records establishing authenticity and title.
Public art: Artwork in the public realm: murals, sculptures, installations, and monuments anyone can experience without a ticket, usually commissioned for a shared space.
Public art master plan: A strategic document setting a public art program’s direction over five to ten years: priority sites, funding, selection processes, equity goals, and care.
Public art program: The standing municipal or institutional structure (staff, policy, budget) through which public art is commissioned, maintained, and managed.
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 high relief, common on facades, monuments, and doors.
Relocation: Moving an artwork to a new site while it stays in the collection, permanently or temporarily during construction, conservation, or redevelopment.
Request for proposals (RFP): A call asking artists to submit a specific concept (design, budget, timeline) so the selection panel chooses both the artist and the artwork at once.
Request for qualifications (RFQ): A call asking artists for past work, experience, and approach rather than a new design, so a shortlist forms before anyone develops 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 honor or commemorate its subject.
Street art: Imagery made in public space outside official channels (wheat-pastes, stencils, stickers), rooted in graffiti culture but aimed at the passing public.

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.