Artists look at how very small, micro events, can leave much larger marks on history and culture in new exhibition

For her part, Andrea Torreblanca was interested in a bit of a departure, a slight shift in what she and her partners at Insite, an arts organization, had been doing.

“I proposed a model which was, instead of only inviting artists and curators to the region, what if we invite curators to work in their places of origin or residence,” she says. “This could spark a different sort of approach to history, in which the curators could really focus on their own genealogies and their own communities.”

The result has been Insite’s “Commonplaces” series, an ongoing project that began in 2021 with curators and artists working with local communities in different regions in Lima, Peru, Johannesburg, South Africa, and San Diego County and Baja California. The organization was founded in 1992 with a series of artist commissions and installations for specific places, focused on public engagement with the arts and the social and political contexts explored in these works.

Based in Mexico City, Torreblanca is the director of the Tamayo Museum there, and is also chief curator at Insite, where her project in “Commonplaces” is “The Sedimentary Effect,” looking at spiritual, ecological, and architectural microhistories of Baja California and Southern California through colla...