Desperate for a social event but scared nothing is going on this weekend?
The Orange County Museum of Art‘s 15th California Biennial — “Desperate, Scared, But Social” — opens this Saturday, June 21, a celebration that is free to the public.
The biennial has been a signature exhibit of the Orange County Museum of Art, held every two years since the 1980s. When the museum put much of its collection in storage and moved into a temporary location in 2017, the biennial was paused pending its expansion.
When OCMA reopened in its new home at the Segerstrom Center of the Arts in 2022, the biennial, showcasing contemporary art created by California artists and communities, was included among the opening exhibits.
The tradition continues, and this year’s exhibition is focused on youth, featuring young adults who have created their own installations alongside established California artists who reflect on their childhoods through their art.
The California Biennial kicks off with a family-friendly block party from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., outside the museum.
Guests can walk through the full exhibit, enjoy various food trucks, make their own exhibition-inspired art and attend a concert featuring artists from the exhibition and other special guests at 7 p.m.
The exhibition will remain open through Jan. 4 and spans the museum’s Special Exhibitions and Permanent Collection Pavilions. Other projects will remain available for viewing on the second floor as well as the sculptures on display on the museum’s rooftop.
“There’s a little bit of something for everyone, which is why we wanted to make the opening all ages,” said Courtenay Finn, the chief curator and the museum’s director of projects. “There’s a chance to see models for the type of life or self-expression that maybe you don’t see in your day-to-day.”
The exhibition — named after Orange County punk band Emily Sassy’s Lime — features work from 12 California artists, including several from Orange County. Their work spans multiple disciplines, including photography, painting, video and music, all related to the experiences of young adults and the California punk scene.
Deanna Templeton, who is based in Huntington Beach, is showcasing a series of photographs of young women who remind her of her younger self. Throughout her installation are her own journal entries from the ages of 14-18.
“It’s putting all of me out there,” Templeton said. “All the pain that I went through and heartache.”
Templeton said she originally saved her teenage diaries to share with her children. When she found out that she was unable to have children, she knew they could still help people going through a hard time, Templeton said.
“I still thought there was something in here to share,” Templeton said. “If you could just hang on, you’ll make it through this.”
Her installation — the first in the biennial exhibition — sets the scene for guests to reflect on their own youth experiences.
Other installations include two group exhibitions by students from Gardena High School and the Orange County Youth Curators program.
Gardena High is showcasing pieces from the school’s almost century-old art collection. From 1919 to 1956, the school ran an art curation class in which students were in charge of conducting studio and exhibition visits, recommending pieces for the school to buy and display throughout its buildings.
“We wanted to connect this historic project where students had been so actively involved in the showcasing, looking at art, talking about art, buying it for their high school and how it was presented with the contemporary program,” Finn said.
In the next room, the contemporary Youth Curators exhibition, “Piece of Me,” features work from the museum’s collection picked for display over the past year by a cohort of 15 Orange County teens. Included in their exhibition are works that have not been on display for 15 years, including a painting that has never been shown before.
“We knew that if we were going to make a show that was speaking about youth culture and coming of age and adolescence, that we wanted to make sure that young people were speaking for themselves,” Finn said.
About two years ago, the curator team — which includes Finn and two guest curators, Christopher Lew and Lauren Leving — traveled across California to find the artists they wanted to feature.
After visiting more than 100 studios and meeting with various artists, they knew they wanted to focus the biennial on the experience of young adults in the past and present, Finn said.
“We intentionally didn’t start with any preconceived ideas of what we wanted to exhibit, or the themes,” Lew said. “We wanted that to really come out of the research and the travel that we were doing.”
Other featured artists include Griselda Rosas and her 12-year-old son Fernando, who are displaying various embroidered drawings the two collaborated on. They are also debuting a large-scale textile made from Fernando’s outgrown clothes.
A map of artist Heesoo Kwon’s childhood home in South Korea, enhanced and reconstructed with Adobe’s AI tool Firefly, will also be displayed.
In addition to unique visual displays, the exhibition will feature various listening stations and videos, including songs by Seth Bogart and Brontez Purnell, as well as concert footage from Emily’s Sassy Lime.
“It was nice to cast a wider interdisciplinary net to the exhibition,” Lew said. “Music is as much of an importance to the show as the visual arts.”
The opening day celebration will end with a concert by various artists, including Emily’s Sassy Lime. The band features three Orange County natives, Emily Ryan and sisters Amy and Wendy Yao, who will be returning to the stage after 25 years to perform songs from their 1995 album that the biennial is named after: “Desperate, Scared, But Social.”
“The more that we talked about their work and the theme of the show, the title kept coming back as capturing both how people felt back then, but how people are feeling right now, and what we’re hoping to foster by making the exhibition,” Finn said.
Emily’s Sassy Lime also has an installation in the exhibition, which features concert footage, archival zines, artwork and letters they sent to other artists in the exhibition in their youth.
In addition to being pen pals with exhibition artists Bogart and Purnell, Emily’s Sassy Lime band members were also an inspiration for The Linda Lindas, a Los Angeles girl punk band who will be displaying drawings, clothing and music videos at the biennial.
As the curator team explored various themes during their original search, they kept coming back to the band and their legacy in L.A. and throughout California, Finn said.
“It’s been tracing this topography of these stories from these different people and learning about the ways that they’re connected, and then it sort of crescendos outwards and creates a cohesive exhibition,” Leving said.
Emily’s Sassy Lime, Purnell, Seth Bogart & The Punkettes and other special guests will be performing at the concert.
The Orange County Museum of Art is open and free to the public Wednesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
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