Installation view: “2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social,” 2025. Orange County Museum of Art.
Yubo Dong, ofstudio
American popular culture has been obsessed with California youth culture since Baby Boomers started driving.
The Beach Boys. Surfing. “Gidget.” The Summer of Love. Jefferson Airplane. Haight-Ashbury. “American Graffiti.”
The obsession never abated.
Skateboarding. The Bones Brigade. Ocean Pacific. Valley Girls. “Saved by the Bell.” Compton. “Beverly Hills 90210.” Hollister. Brandy Melville. “The Hills.” “The O.C.”
California kids are the original influencers.
The Orange County Museum of Art examines California youth culture from the inside during its current rendition of the California Biennial, “Desperate, Scared, But Social,” on view through January 4, 2026. Titled after the 1995 album by Orange County riot grrrl band Emily’s Sassy Lime, featured artists in the show, the exhibition takes youth–its awkwardness, radicality, resilience–as both theme and inspiration.
Revealed is a more nuanced portrayal of Cali teens than the Zach Morris-Kelly Kapowski stereotypes.
“The whole show is about coming of age and the creative base of adolescence, where you’re trying to figure out how you fit in, where you fit in, who you want to be in the world, who you want to make community with,” Orange County Museum of Art Chief Curator Courtenay Finn told Forbes.com. “As we were looking back at both our own youth and working with the artists–some of whom are young, some of whom are collaborating with teens–we felt like it captured both that messy, ecstatic stage, but also how we’re all kind of feeling right now, too.”
Desperation and fear are certainly not emotions reserved for teens in 2025 America.
“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 evoking the unique alchemy of coming-of-age. The show has a punk rock, garage band, DIY, mix tape, basement, make-do sensibility, flowing from the band and album inspiring its title.
Emily’s Sassy Lime formed in 1990s Irvine behind sisters Amy Yao and Wendy Yao and their friend Emily Ryan. The group’s landmark stretch in Orange County punk history is revisited in the Biennial through an installation looking back to their time as bandmates including 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, a 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. The Linda Lindas used to play at Ooga Booga when it had a physical location in L.A.’s Chinatown and attended creative workshops hosted by Wendy Yao. Emily’s Sassy Lime members know The Linda Linda’s parents. They’re role models.
Emily’s Sassy Lime’s installation in the Biennial is right next to one for The Linda Linda’s
The Kids Are All Right
Giving a prestigious museum over to a bunch of kids, and artwork previously made by kids, wouldn’t get out of the brainstorming stage in a lot of places. But OCMA Director and CEO Heidi Zuckerman is a mom and was on board from the get-go.
“She has always tried to build the museum to be a family friendly, all ages place where you can come with your grandmother, with your baby, with your neighbor,” Finn said. “She was excited about this idea of what young people can teach us, and also that curiosity and creativity that young folks have that we sometimes forget. Our imagination slows down a little bit (as we age). We’re more conscious of doing the right thing, or fitting in, or what we should do.”
With that in mind, the grown-ups have much to learn from the kids.
“A sense that there’s a possibility for imagining a future that doesn’t exist. A willingness to experiment and break rules. A chance to step outside of a box and be creative,” Finn explained. “There’s something really expansive about friendship and the communities that get built during (adolescence), where the people you surround yourself with, that you spend time with, that you share your hopes and dreams and secrets with, and make stuff together, it’s like world building.”
Young artists’ efforts to build community and find connection across time, distance, and disciplines are a central Biennial theme. As is youth rebellion. Anxiety. The universality of adolescence.
“We’re excited to share with people that thing when you’re young, where you feel like no one understands you, and your parents or adults have forgotten what it’s like to experience that, and just remind ourselves that we have all gone through this stage,” Finn said.
Biennial artworks aren’t only from kids. Early pieces by now established California artists and contemporary collaborations between artists and their children are featured along with work by teens past and present who continue reshaping 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.
Installation view: “2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social,” 2025. Orange County Museum of Art.
Simon Klein
The Gardena High School Art Collection
One gallery in the California Biennial 2025 is devoted to the Gardena High School Art Collection, a remarkable legacy of student-led art collecting showcasing early 20th-century California art acquired by Gardena High students between 1919–1956. Influenced by the Gardena High School students, OCMA created the Orange County Young Curators program in September 2024.
The aim is to cultivate young creatives as active participants in culture, building a space that centers young people’s ideas, knowledge, skills, strengths, and experiences. The after-school program paid 15 high school juniors and seniors from across the county to attend get togethers at OCMA biweekly to learn about curatorial practice and all facets of arts administration.
As part of the program, the teens curated their own Biennial exhibition drawn from OCMA’s collection. The exhibition, “Piece of Me”— titled after Britney Spears’s 2007 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).
“They gravitated to almost all work that was made before they were born. A lot of it is really analog,” Finn said. “They were looking at painting, sculpture, early analog photography. They weren’t going for things that they’re seeing in their day to day, and they were really interested in work that told stories.”
In an America now wholly given over to a single-focus mania of jamming children into STEM education–science, technology, engineering, math–of attempting to create a society of knowers, not thinkers, where secure jobs crunching numbers in sterile environments are an aspiration, and messy, creative jobs employing empathy are ridiculed, the OCMA Young Curators program is a beacon of resistance.
“It’s why there’s such a push to make it STEAM and add ‘art’ back in into that because they realized what was missing was using your imagination as a tool; what stories and ideas and images don’t exist yet, and how can we make them and share them and learn about each other,” Finn said. “It’s great to learn techniques and skill sets that you can apply, and there’s so many interesting things that can get made with those tools, but if you’re not learning how to imagine or how to be creative or curious, what you make with those skills might not be as innovative. That’s why we need artists. They imagine a world that we don’t know exists yet.”
The world that exists, as built by adults, is a total wreck. Kids couldn’t do any worse.
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