The Orange County Museum of Art is desperate. And scared. But social.
“Desperate, Scared But Social” is the name of a 1995 album by riot grrrl band Emily’s Sassy Lime, and it’s the title of OCMA’s 2025 California Biennial, which explores the landscape of late adolescence and early adulthood through the lens of intergenerational dialogue and cultural inheritance.
According to information from OCMA, the exhibition takes youth—its awkwardness, radicality, resilience—as both theme and inspiration. Featured artworks span generations, from early works by now-established California artists to contemporary collaborations between artists and their children. It includes work by teens past and present who continue to reshape culture.
The Biennial includes two embedded exhibitions within the larger show: a curated selection of historical works from a California high school collection and a group show curated by teens from local high schools.
Presented across OCMA’s Special Exhibitions and Permanent Collection Pavilions, “Desperate, Scared, But Social” features 12 California artists and collectives, two embedded group exhibitions, listening stations, reading rooms, site-responsive installations, sculptures, photographs, paintings, and ephemera—all elements that explore the transformative process of “coming-of-age.”
Biennial Overview
At a special preview of the California Biennial 2025 on June 20, Heidi Zuckerman, OCMA’s CEO and Director, explained that OCMA was the first organization in California to do a biennial, which is now in its 15th edition.
Regarding this year’s theme, Zuckerman noted that “Kids keep us honest. And I think at this particular time when the world is super complex and there’s all sorts of information coming from a variety of different sources, you can always trust your kids and their friends and their classmates to tell you the truth. And with this idea of desperate, scared, but social, I personally feel all those three different degrees. Sometimes I feel more desperate, or sometimes I feel more social, and there’s kind of a playfulness to it, which is, I think, inherently optimistic. One of the things we can do at a museum is bring together artists and artworks and audience and have a dialog, a conversation, and that idea of building community through those couple of facets are essential to what it is that we do here. We have always been an epicenter for culture, and this is really an amazing way to mark this particular moment in time.”
OCMA Chief Curator and Director of Programs Courtenay Finn shared, “From public school collections to after-school curatorial cohorts, we are excited to showcase how young people have long participated in shaping California’s visual culture. Providing access to the arts for young adults and children is not only essential, but it is also a powerful catalyst for generational exchange.”
Biennial Journey
According to Finn, she invited fellow curators Christopher Liu, the former curator at the Whitney, and Lauren Leving, an independent curator from Chicago, to help her plan the biennial.
“We came together and spent the better part of two years driving across the state, visiting studios, going to museums, looking at collections, talking to other curators, talking to artists, just seeing what people were making. We didn’t start the show with the preconceived theme. We didn’t have an idea of what we should be saying about California or what the exhibition would be. It really was generated from the visits along the way.”
As the trio went through their journey, they realized there were a lot of artists revisiting moments from their adolescence—how they grew up, how they came to be, that moment where they figured out what they wanted to be and who they wanted to be in their community.
“Whether it was collaborating with their own teen kids, whether it was revisiting photographs or ephemera from their youth, reconnecting with that moment in time, or whether, actually the artists themselves were young, and so we sort of built this idea together, and really wanted to build an exhibition that tells that sort of intergenerational story,” said Finn.
Community Building
Liu stated that the title of the biennial came from the album title by the band Emily’s Sassy Lime, which he said is comprised of “three artists, musicians, cultural producers that have a very large-scale installation that’s part of the exhibition. So for us, that sense of intergeneration, that ideas around intergenerational connections and community building, I think, is deeply emblematic of how the band operated in the 90s. They were a teen band that was traveling across the United States touring with other punk bands. Their parents did not know about this, so it happened with a bit of subterfuge, but with an incredible amount of ambition as well. They were connecting with artists and musicians that were older and younger than them throughout their time, so a lot of their ways of thinking about their own work, and how they were kind of maneuvering through this kind of social creative landscape, was really emblematic of the exhibition itself.”
Liu said there is a juvenilia section, which looks at an array of artists presenting a lot of work from their teenage years, even though now they’re much older.
“I think you get a sense of the amazing kind of vision and talent that they had at that early stage and how that really matures into who they are now as artists,” said Liu.
Orange County Roots
Leving reinforced the fact that they wanted to root the exhibition in Orange County.
“The first kind of installation is by Deanna Templeton, who was born and raised and still lives in Huntington Beach, and she’s been working on a series since 2000 called “What She Said,” where she’s documenting young women and teen girls all over the country, but often here in Orange County, and really exploring subcultures.”
Leving said that Templeton had a rough entry into young adulthood, so her exhibit explores being vulnerable about the tumult of adolescence.
“She also has these vitrines of ephemera that she has kept through from youth and into adulthood,” said Leving. “So with concert tickets, music was super important to her. It’s a really big theme throughout the show. You’ll see these elements of music as an outlet during adolescence, this time of hardship, but also joy really comes up. It’s a theme of world building, of what we want to create, especially when we feel maybe desperate and scared, but wanting to build a community around us.”
Young Curators Create “Piece of Me”
There is an exhibition within the exhibition called “Peace of Me,” which is created by the Orange County Young Curators organization, which makes sense for a show about adolescence. OCYC is comprised of juniors and seniors from local high schools who learn about curatorial practices, from building a show, writing and hanging labels, lighting, and other important curatorial elements.
Laura Wagner is a senior from Corona del Mar High School who will be attending the University of Connecticut. She is one of the young curators who worked on “Piece of Me.” She was excited to participate in the 2025 Biennial.
“First of all, it’s curated by teenagers, and this just talks about adolescence, which is one of the biggest things that connects us to it,” said Wagner. “I think it’s such a unique program, the way that teenagers are able to actually carve out a space in the museum. The fact that they were able to put together a biennial about teenagers and have teenager input is, I think, the key connection to it, but also just the fact that it talks about teenage identity, and that’s something that almost every single installation here talks about—they talk about female identity, and those identities are so central to their eras. And we are seeing that again today with teenagers and just having that kind of core identity and how putting it out to people is different from who you actually are inside, and how that interacts.”
Visit OCMA
The California Biennial, which runs through January 4, opened on Saturday, June 21 with a block party featuring a full day of art, music and community. That evening a family-friendly concert includes Seth Bogart & The Punkettes, Brontez Purnell, a reunion by Emily’s Sassy Lime, and special guests the Linda Lindas.
Throughout the run of the biennial, OCMA will host weekly public tours and artist talks by participating artists including Deanna Templeton, Heesoo Kwon, Griselda Rosas, and Wendy Yao.
OCMA is located at 3333 Avenue of the Arts in Costa Mesa. It is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information go to www.ocma.art
Biennial History
At its inception in 1984 at OCMA’s original museum site in Newport Beach, the California Biennial was the only regular survey of contemporary art in California, consistently offering audiences the newest developments in one of the world’s great creative centers and supporting the work of many artists who have gone on to enjoy major international careers. Since 1984, the biennial has presented the work of 305 contemporary artists. In 2022, as part of the move to OCMA’s new permanent home, the museum revived the signature biennial format, emphasizing the importance of exploring the richness of the state’s expansive and diverse creative communities.
The Orange County Museum of Art has a proven reputation as an innovative art museum with a history of discovering and actively engaging with living artists at pivotal points in their careers. The museum has organized and presented critically acclaimed exhibitions that have traveled nationally and internationally to more than 35 venues. The museum’s collection of more than 4,500 works of art includes important examples of modern and contemporary art and artists inspired by or working in California.
