Glossary
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.
For a public collection, provenance includes the commissioning story: who funded the work, how the artist was selected, what the dedication meant to the community at the time. That context is interpretive gold and legal protection at once.
Gaps are the norm in older civic collections: works donated generations ago with a plaque and nothing else, artists recorded only as a surname. The fixable part is urgency: the people who remember a 1970s commission are still reachable now. An afternoon of oral history with a retired parks director can recover what no archive holds.