COSTA MESA, CA, May 28, 2025—The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) has announced new details about the upcoming California Biennial 2025: Desperate, Scared, But Social, on view from June 21, 2025–January 4, 2026. Organized by OCMA Chief Curator and Director of Programs Courtenay Finn, founder of C/O: Curatorial Office and former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art Christopher Y. Lew, and Associate Curator Lauren Leving, the 15th edition of OCMA’s biennial explores the charged terrain of late adolescence and early adulthood through the lens of intergenerational dialogue, personal archive, and cultural inheritance. A celebratory opening day block party and public programs will accompany the exhibition.
Titled after the 1995 album by Orange County riot grrrl band Emily’s Sassy Lime, who are featured artists, 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, through to work by teens past and present who continue to reshape culture from their precocious perspectives. The Biennial also 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 contemporary teens—emphasizing how young adults have built and continue to build new models, formats and modalities for creative engagement.
Heidi Zuckerman, OCMA CEO and Director, says, “The biennial arrives at a moment when both the present and future can feel uncertain, especially in the wake of devastating Los Angeles wildfires that have touched the lives of many participating artists. In response, the exhibition looks toward the generative power of youth, offering a vision of hope, perseverance, and possibility.”
Co-curator Christopher Y. Lew adds, “Desperate, Scared, But Social charts burgeoning and often unruly creative output throughout California and across generations that has yet to be fully defined. The exhibition highlights how artists build community by forming collectives and carving out space for connection, while also revealing the subtle and overt ways these cultural producers have influenced one another across time, place, and disciplines.”
Chief Curator Courtenay Finn shares, “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.”
EXHIBITION OVERVIEW
Presented across OCMA’s Special Exhibitions and Permanent Collection Pavilions, Desperate, Scared, But Social features twelve California artists and collectives, two embedded group exhibitions, listening stations, reading rooms, site-responsive installations, sculptures, photographs, paintings, and ephemera that evoke the unique alchemy of coming-of-age.
Deanna Templeton’s What She Said kicks off the exhibition with a disarming photographic installation pairing her street portraits of young women with handwritten pages from her own teenage diaries, interwoven with punk flyers and zines from 1980s Orange County. Templeton’s work serves as a connective tissue between eras and ideologies, echoing themes of angst, defiance, subculture, and identity.
The Juvenilia gallery surveys early creative output from now-established California artists—work made in their teens and early twenties, showcasing early talent and in-process evolution. This section of the Biennial features documentation of two 1997 performances by artist-filmmaker-author Miranda July, capturing her roots in DIY punk spaces and her ongoing fascination with public intimacy and vulnerability. Joey Terrill’s expansive personal archive Los Diablos (1969–ongoing) builds an imagined city through a queer, Chicano, and teenage lens, offering elaborate, diaristic maps that have never before been exhibited, while Laura Owens shares a selection of her high school paintings and drawings, revealing the foundations of her now-renowned visual language and highlighting adolescence as a creative escape hatch. The gallery features a listening station and custom vitrines spotlighting multidisciplinary artists Seth Bogart and Brontez Purnell, allowing visitors to immerse themselves in the sonic worlds of Purnell’s teen punk band, The Social Lies, with Tameka Whetstone as well as Gravy Train!!!!–the Bay Area band that included both artists, Heather Jewett, and Carolina Garza. Additionally, Bogart and Purnell present their respective early zines, correspondence, and related works that capture the raw, performative energy of queer youth culture.
Griselda Rosas, Stanya Kahn, and Heesoo Kwon offer intimate meditations on family, memory, and dual identity. Rosas collaborates with her 12-year-old son Fernando on embroidered drawings and a large- scale textile made from Fernando’s outgrown clothes, which will make its exhibition debut. Kahn’s 2020 Super 16mm film No Go Backs follows her son and his best friend (both of whom contributed to the film’s soundtrack) on an allegorical trek through California’s Eastern Sierra, confronting collapse and kinship with lyricism and unease. Meanwhile, Kwon maps her childhood home in Korea across the gallery in collaboration with Adobe’s artificial intelligence tool Firefly, in an attempt to reconstruct and expand her early memories, blurring the boundaries of experience and imagination.
The Gardena High School Art Collection presents a remarkable legacy of student-led art collecting, showcasing early 20th-century California art acquired by Gardena High students between 1919–1956. This unique public-school initiative speaks to the deep civic engagement and cultural stewardship of California’s youth over the past century. This gallery presents fifteen paintings by artists including Jessie Arms Botke, Agnes Lawrence Pelton, and Elmer Wachtel, among others.
Influenced by the Gardena High School students, OMCA created the Orange County Young Curators (OCYC) program in September 2024. The program’s aim is to cultivate not just young creatives but active participants, building a space that centers young people’s ideas, knowledge, skills, strengths, and experiences, while contributing to impactful creative youth development. The paid after-school program comprises fifteen high school juniors and seniors from across the county and meets biweekly at OCMA to learn about curatorial practice and all facets of arts administration. As part of the program, the teens have curated their own exhibition drawn from OCMA’s collection through a Gen Z lens. The exhibition, Piece of Me—titled after Britney Spears’s 2007 hit song—centers around discussions of self-perception, nostalgia, and the impact of technology on identity, engaging with the central theme of what it means to grow up in a hyper-visible world. Piece of Me features nine works, many which have not been shown for the past 15 years, and one of which has never been exhibited—artist Alison Van Pelt’s painting Britney (2004).
A landmark moment in Orange County punk history is revisited through the inclusion of Emily’s Sassy Lime, the trailblazing teenage riot grrrl band formed in 1990s Irvine by sisters Amy Yao and Wendy Yao and their friend Emily Ryan. The installation looks back to their time as bandmates and includes archival zines, letters, concert footage, and both individual and collective artwork. Wendy Yao’s Ooga Booga— her iconic artist-run shop and community hub—presents a retail pop-up for the duration of the biennial, offering zines, books, and ephemera by California-based artists. Carrying this lineage forward are The Linda Lindas, the breakout all-girl punk band that began when its members were pre-teens and teens; and whose drawings, clothing, handmade objects, and music videos embody a new generation’s creative resistance and joy.
Appearing throughout and bookending Desperate, Scared, But Social, Woody De Othello’s large-scale sculptures and paintings transform everyday domestic objects into humorous, anthropomorphic forms—clock faces drip, radios slump, and radiator grates wiggle. Rooted in the African concept of Nkisi, his works act as vessels of spiritual energy, offering healing and refuge amid the emotional turbulence of young adulthood. His paintings echo this surreal sensibility, with crowded interiors and obscured portraits evoking anxiety, intimacy, and the need for escape.
Opening Day
Desperate, Scared, But Social will open with a free celebratory block party on Saturday, June 21, 11am- 9pm PDT. The event features a full day of art, music and community. Guests of all ages are invited to learn more about the exhibition by joining a curator-led tour, make risograph posters and zines inspired by Emily’s Sassy Lime, Seth Bogart, and Brontez Purnell, create screen-printed totes and shirts, enjoy live music, and partake in an assortment of food trucks and artist-inspired snacks at OCMA’s cafe Verdant. At 7pm, a family-friendly concert includes Seth Bogart & The Punkettes, Brontez Purnell, a reunion by Emily’s Sassy Lime, and special guests. Media is strongly encouraged to RSVP by June 17, 2025 for the evening concert.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Throughout the run of the biennial, OCMA will host weekly public tours of the Biennial; Weekly school tours for students throughout Orange County, each with free lunch and free transportation; Bi-monthly Art & Play activities for small children and their caregivers; Monthly artist talks by participating artists, including Deanna Templeton, Heesoo Kwon, Griselda Rosas, and Wendy Yao; Monthly Family Fun programs, with hands-on art-making activities for all ages; Monthly Art Happy Hour & Pop-Up Tours, with a cocktail & mocktail inspired by the works on view; Mail Art, Zine, and Drawing workshops led by artists Joey Terrill, Emily’s Sassy Lime, and Griselda Rosas.
Address: 3333 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa, CA 92626
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday; 11:00am–6:00pm
Free general admission generously sponsored by Lugano Diamonds.
