About INSITE

Founded in 1992, INSITE privileges the long-term engagement of artists developing new works conceived for specific sites and political-social contexts. Through collaborations among artists, cultural agents, institutions, and communities, the conceptual framework of INSITE is rooted in the notion of the public—both in the context of experiences, interventions, and installations in the public domain, and of geographical spaces that have inspired artists to imagine the civic and social arena.

Since 2019, INSITE has been working on several new platforms that include curatorial projects, artist commissions, publications, conversations, and productions based on the INSITE Archive.

INSITE Commonplaces began in March 2021 as a new platform for producing work with curators, artists, and communities, working locally in different regions of the world. Miguel A. López developed a project from Lima, Peru; curator Gabi Ngcobo from Johannesburg, South Africa; and Andrea Torreblanca from San Diego County and Baja California, US/Mexico.

The INSITE Journal was launched in the fall of 2019 as a bilingual publication that explores the intersection of art and the public sphere. Featuring new commissioned writing and recent research from the INSITE Archive, the Journal engages curators, theorists, art historians, urbanists, and philosophers thinking about critical social, cultural, and political issues.

The public launch of the INSITE Archive in early 2019 made available for the first time documentation of the more than 250 artist commissions, public programs, and publications realized since 1992. In addition, the archive serves as a live platform and research tool to produce short video pieces about selected past projects—in most cases with new interviews with the artists.

The INSITE Lab was conceived in 2022 as a roving transborder platform for emerging artists designed to facilitate conversations and experiences around process and research in art making. Through the Lab, INSITE invests in cohorts of artists—affording time and critical/curatorial feedback to invigorate processes of reimagining the region as a laboratory for collaboration and discourse. The Lab fosters a sustainable cultural ecosystem—hopefully encouraging artists to stay in the region as their careers unfold. The Lab is realized through a collaboration between INSITE and the haudenschildGarage.