It takes as much gumption to be impressionable as it does to be influential. To stand, unmarred by the spurs of time, as eager to consume as to be consumed, is a remarkable feat— and not one often achieved by individuals past the age of their adolescence. The juvenile period of one’s intellectual and emotional development is oft fraught with knotted feelings and bloated hopes, at once free of the jaded practicalities of adulthood and weighty with the looming responsibility of self-actualization. To be an adolescent, in all of its terrible foreignness, is to be inherently artistic, and inarguably brave. 

The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) recognizes as such: in the theme for this summer’s forthcoming 2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social. Opening June 21st and running until mid-October, the 15th edition of OCMA’s anticipated exhibition series features 12 artists and collectives across media and discipline, all exploring the rich emotional textures that accompany late adolescence.

Organized by Courtenay Finn and Christopher Y. Lew with Lauren Leving, exhibition encourages artists among the likes of Brontez Purnell, Griselda Rosas, Miranda July, Seth Bogart, Laura Owens, Woody De Othello, Emily's Sassy Lime, The Linda Lindas, and Joey Terrill to examine adolescence by interfacing with their own pasts, families, and teens in their communities, yielding personal ephemera across a multitude of mediums. The exhibition will also feature large-scale presentations by Deanna Templeton and Heesoo Kwon, displaying scans of Templeton’s teenage diaries and images made of young women she’s met over the years, as well as Kwon’s childhood photographs expanded by generative AI.

Alongside Finn, Lew, and Leving’s curation in Desperate, Scared, But Social is work curated by members of OCMA’s Orange County Young Curators program. Inaugurated last September, the OCYC program pairs 15 high school juniors and seniors across the Los Angeles county with museum staff and Biennial curators to present their own exhibition drawn from OCMA’s permanent collection, which will be presented alongside a selection of works from the Gardena High School Collection, a California-centric collection built over a century by the senior high school students at California’s Gardena High School. 

To endure adolescence in the first place, and to create despite it all, takes a certain level of tenacity. To reflect on one’s own adolescence with tenderness, to treat it with the respect it certainly deserves, is much more complex. OCMA’s 2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social, treats adolescence (and adolescents themselves) as not only aesthetically championable, but worthy of serious artistic examination.