Maybe it's just a happy coincidence, or maybe the museum gods convened and decided, "some people are a bit wary of going to Mexico these days, and others can't afford to travel right now — so let's bring Mexico to them."

Whatever the reason, a trove of spring exhibitions offers access to Mexico's earliest civilization, illuminates the Spanish conquest and explores the issues that have a grip on the country today, all without ever leaving California. These are art exhibitions, but their impact is hardly esoteric. Tweaking traditional art forms and laying bare their creators' political passions, the individual shows add up to a glimpse into Mexico's soul.

"Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico"

The oldest civilization in the Americas, flourishing along the Gulf Coast from 1200 to 400 B.C., the Olmec are best known for the impossibly huge stone heads they carved. But we can learn more about these mysterious forebears from their wealth of surprisingly sophisticated jadeite masks, intricate pottery, and delicate stone figures carved from jadeite, serpentine and granite. They even devised mirrors of magnetite and hematite. By the 2nd millennium B.C., the Olmec (a name we gave them; we don't know what they called themselves) had developed a distinct artistic style.

The exhibit's more than 100 objects, primarily from Mexican collections, include some of the latest archaeological finds. Among the most intriguing pieces, aside from the massive stone heads with their almond-shaped eyes and fleshy lips, is a larger-than-life stone figure whose high-waisted belt, bands below the knee and Buster Posey crouch suggest he was a ruler playing in a ball game; a rare depiction of a female figure in a pleated skirt carved into a stela; a ceremonial grouping that apparently was made to be buried; and a baby with its face scrunched up in a full-tilt wail that will be familiar to any parent.

We still know less about the Olmec than any other Mexican culture, though the foundations of later civilizations are obvious — one stela bears the date equivalent to Sept. 3, 32 B.C. in dots and lines that look strikingly like Maya date inscriptions (minus the symbol for zero). New discoveries seem to introduce more questions than answers. What was the significance of the X motif proliferating on belts, loincloths and chest plates? Why is war all but absent from their artistic endeavors? And with no wheels or beasts of burden, let alone derricks and cranes, how ever did they get those 24-ton basalt boulders from the distant Tuxtla Mountains to their coastal cities? (A film near the end of the exhibit shows an experiment theorizing how it might have been done.)

Through May 8 at San Francisco's de Young Museum

"Mexico: Expected/Unexpected"

Flash forward to the cold, hard present. It takes three venues, two in San Diego and one in Long Beach, to display these 100-plus artworks from one of Mexico's most extensive contemporary art collections. Painting, photography, installation pieces, video art, sculpture and text from the country's most important artists are exhibited in the context of key historical artists, organized in themes such as the relationship between city and nature, the precariousness of everyday life, symbols of nationalism, constructive logic, archival accumulation and imagery of death and mortality.

It all sounds a bit...cerebral...but the imagery is pure sensation, emerging with unmistakable urgency from cultural issues in today's Mexico: a sexual dance of death with a skeleton, steeped in Christian iconography; hinged metal animals that invite manipulation by the audience; wall art with mankind's favorite four-letter word woven into the pattern; a maze of hanging garlic bulbs; massing birds darkening the sky; four panels of newspaper clippings of "Vulnerabilia (Water, Fire, Mass, Ruins)"; a (stuffed) donkey sitting rather dog-like on its, well, ass; a red neon "DANGER" sign with the "D" flickering off and on, turning "danger" into "anger" and another with "BORDER" alternating with "ORDER"; an abandoned theater with real-life suicide notes spelled out on its marquees; and a maimed toreador after his bout with the bull.

Through May 15 at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and Museum of Latin American Art

"Splendors of Faith/Scars of Conquest"

If you attended fourth grade in California, you know about the missions (California's, anyway), but you probably got the musty, sanitized version. This exhibition, subtitled "The Arts of the Missions of Northern New Spain, 1600-1821," fills in the extermes — the conflict between the zealous Catholic missionaries and their reluctant charges, who already had a perfectly serviceable spirituality of their own, on the one hand; on the other, the splendor of the paintings, sculptures, and other objects made in the missions or sent from Spain, which have never received this kind of spotlight before. It also expands our concept of the missions; California was a small portion of a network whose reach extended not only to Texas, New Mexico and Florida, but to the Mexican states of Baja California, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Nayarit, Sinaloa, Sonora, Durango, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Tamaulipas.

The daunting undertaking brings together for the first time artworks from all these regions. Among the oldest objects are maps and studies of indigenous cultures, whose basketry, wood and shell items are part of the exhibition. Other works were created by Mexico City's fine artists, craftsmen in the colonized regions and European and Asian artisans. Paintings and sculptures of Christ, the Virgin Mary and various saints and martyrs — depicted in grisly detail in the colossal painting that anchors the exhibition — filled mission churches. Religious rituals employed rich vestments and ceremonial objects of gold and silver, growing more lavish as the mission enterprise expanded.

Adding immeasurably to the experience is a companion installation, "Contemporary Coda," expressing modern perspectives on the Spanish conquest. The 17 works by mostly native and Latino artists weave issues of immigration, religion, Chicano identity and the assault on native Californians' culture into traditional Catholic themes such as the Virgin of Guadalupe or heaven and hell. Others execute traditional religious images in unconventional or high-tech materials such as computer circuit boards.

Through May 29 at the Oakland Museum of California

"Mexico: Política y Poética"

All but one of this group of artists were born in the 1960s and '70; they part ways with top Mexican artists of the 1990s in their cool, sophisticated and less obviously "Mexican" style. Though their content is often inspired by Mexico's culture and politics, they exhibit at major European and American museums and sell in contemporary, rather than Latin American art auctions.

This explicitly political exhibit includes animation as well as art, as well as work from earlier influential artists to bolster the young artists' subtle ties to their predecessors and to Mexican culture and history. Fiery Revolutionary portraits are echoed in such images as a mother holding a baby in a bandoleer, who himself holds a rifle, in an installation artist Francis Alys began during the Chiapas uprising. Modern use of traditional forms also produces risque papel picado (cut paper) works and sexual tattoos on vintage advertisements, photographs and other items.

Any doubt that these artists' roots are in Mexico should be dispelled by marcelaygina's unconventional portraits of people through the remnants they left behind while crossing the Río Bravo (or making the attempt) into the United States. And it's hard to imagine a more chilling technique than Teresa Margolles' paintings on paper dipped in the post-autopsy fluids of corpses from a Mexico City morgue, shimmering with the residue of minerals and chemicals sloughed off when life is over.

Through March 24 at San Francisco State University's Fine Arts Gallery

"Disponible — A Kind of Mexican Show, Phase 2"

Continuing and expanding the exhibition whose first phase ran through Feb. 9, this show is named for the empty billboards reading "disponible" (available), followed by a phone number, that dot the skylines of cities across Mexico. Like the word itself, which also means changeable or disposable, the seven contemporary artists' film, video, sound, installation and performance pieces play on the unpredictable and contradictory reality of life in Mexico, with a focus on issues such as violence, gangs and drugs.

Topics range from minute to enormous issues. Mauricio Limón's video "Bizco Merolico Chorus" features Mexico City subway vendors repeating their sales pitches; Edgardo Aragón's video "Matamoros" re-creates his father's journey from Oaxaca to Tamaulipas as a drug trafficker.

The work of Teresa Margolles, hailing from the homicide-wracked state of Sinaloa, focuses on narcoviolencia and can be macabre at times. Here she features keymaker Antonio Hernandez Cumacho from Ciudad Juárez, and the challenge of running a small business in a border city riddled with drugs and violence. The film "El General" by Sundance festival winner Natalia Almada, great-granddaughter of controversial 1920s Mexican president Plutarco Elias Calles, presents a portrait of a family and a country bound to the past.

Through March 26 at the San Francisco Art Institute