Emily’s Sassy Lime, Olympia, WA, ca. 1995.
Curated by Courtenay Finn, Christopher Y. Lew, and Lauren Leving
When I was coming of age in the 1990s, there were constant parental freak-outs about the scourge of pot smoking and sex parties (neither of which I was actually cool enough to engage in), and lots of culture-wars pearl-clutching about oversexed pop stars and raunchy rap lyrics. Then came Columbine in the spring of 1999, just before I turned fourteen, which redirected attention to a legion of video-game-addicted boys seemingly at risk of turning their disaffection into violence against their teachers and classmates. Fast-forward twenty-six years, and worries about drugs, sex, and violence persist, but most of the talk now revolves around the brain rot caused by cell phones and social media, which are making kids—and adults, for that matter—dumb, lazy, disconnected, and depressed. The sensationalist Newsweek headlines and 20/20 episodes of my youth have been replaced by influencers of dubious credentials peddling half-baked advice, while public intellectuals, led by The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt, prescribe solutions to problems that we don’t yet even comprehend. The media would have us believe that the kids are anything but all right—but then again, maybe they never have been.
Despite its title, “Desperate, Scared, But Social,” the 2025 California Biennial is decidedly not about teen panic, or at least not in a tedious, moralizing sense. Curated by Courtenay Finn, Christopher Y. Lew, and Lauren Leving, the exhibition—which features a tight list of just twelve participating artists and collectives—takes adolescence as its theme, framing it as a time marked by intensity, insecurity, transformation, and possibility, perhaps especially for those who might go on to be artists. The show is neither a rigorous historical exploration of the theme nor your typical scene-surveying biennial. Instead, it’s something in between: idiosyncratic, exuberant, unexpected, and sometimes awkward, with vibes that swing high and low to capture one of life’s most significant and least understood moments of physical and psychological metamorphosis.
The ’80s and ’90s loom large throughout the show, beginning with an installation by Deanna Templeton that functions as a gateway into the exhibition. The gallery’s pink walls are lined with a rhythmic arrangement of Templeton’s street portraits of teens, taken between 2004 and 2023, interspersed with entries transcribed from her own teenage diaries. The texts are angsty and unintentionally hilarious, alternating between recounting mundane events and ruminating on love, longing, and hyperbolic self-loathing (to the point of suicidal ideation). An entry from April 13, 1987, reads: laid out today, got some more color. went to a party with alex and matt and ann. alex is so cute!! and nice. we took nick back with us. he suggested that me and ann have sex with them. man some times i wish i was a slut. Others chronicle episodes of body shame and minor girl drama with an urgency that is deeply endearing, a match for the defiant, self-possessed stares of the teen subjects in Templeton’s photographs.
Nearby, one encounters juvenilia by Joey Terrill in the form of Los Diablos, 1969–, a series of meticulously detailed maps and lists of spaces he made in high school in the late ’60s and early ’70s. They collectively identify sites across Los Angeles important to him as a queer Chicano youth—from houses of worship to movie theaters and restaurants. Terrill’s work is hung adjacent to videos of early performances by Miranda July, whose doe-eyed young-adult energy still pervades her work today, even as she’s become best known for a novel about perimenopause; and a series of ceramic sculptures by artist and musician Seth Bogart that reproduce magazines, books, posters, and flyers—including a ceramic replica of an issue of Homeboy Beautiful, a short-lived zine Terrill made in the late ’80s.
The next few galleries retreat from a DIY aesthetic and direct attention to other aspects of youth culture. Griselda Rosas’s large-scale drawings and embroideries, made in collaboration with her preteen son Fernando, capture a relationship between parent and child that is on the precipice of transformation. Coronation, 2025, one of the most moving works in the group, is a memorial to Fernando’s childhood, woven and sewn together from his old clothes. Feelings of melancholy carry over into a cavernous space for Stanya Kahn’s austere film No Go Backs, 2020, in which Kahn’s teenage son Lenny and his best friend Elijah try to survive in a barren landscape after the collapse of civilization, with ragtag bands of teens as the only other survivors they encounter.
The show is neither a rigorous historical exploration of the theme nor your typical scene-surveying biennial. Instead, it’s something in between: idiosyncratic, exuberant, unexpected, and sometimes awkward.
The dystopian premise of No Go Backs sets the stage for a sleek installation by Heesoo Kwon, the only artist in the exhibition who works extensively with new technology. In a move that feels pulled from a Black Mirror episode, Kwon uses AI software to expand the images in her personal family photographs, thus blurring the lines between memory and imagination. Kwon leaves visible the evidence of manipulation: Red time stamps, familiar to anyone raised with drugstore-printed photographs, mark the edge of each archival image; anything beyond the time stamp is the product of AI inference. The results—which are integrated into a massive wall graphic, fabric curtains, and framed photographs—are mixed and occasionally bizarre, especially where bodies get in the way. But the uncanny quality of the images doesn’t detract from the profundity of Kwon’s method. Her work is a metaphor for how we all retroactively experience and narrate our childhoods to suit our present purposes and evolving senses of self. Memory is a deeply flawed operation that can’t always be trusted; whether we realize it or not, we all wind up filling in the blanks beyond the frame of what we know for certain.
The poetics of adolescence—and its propensity to haunt us into adulthood—take a back seat in the weakest section of the exhibition. Fourteen paintings made between ca. 1905 and ca. 1956 serve as a representative slice of the Gardena High School Art Collection, a program that invited students to select and acquire works to be displayed on their campus. The collection went into storage for many years after the school moved in the ’50s, but was resuscitated in 2010 with a book and traveling exhibition organized by a group of alumni in 2019 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the collection. Yet this display of a sleepy group of paintings, conservative even for their time, does little to convey the real purpose of the project: empowering teens to develop an eye for art and to make lasting contributions to their communities.
That noble mission is much better accomplished by the exhibition’s final galleries. The penultimate space featured a capsule show of work drawn from ocma’s collection, headlined by a 2004 portrait of Britney Spears by Alison Van Pelt. Organized by a group of fifteen high schoolers recruited into a curatorial workshop that will now become a fixture of the museum’s education department, the show-within-a show—titled “Piece of Me” after one of Spears’s more introspective singles—features nine works that, as some of the teen curators told me, felt particularly relevant to the contemporary youth experience. Nearly all of the works they chose were made before they were born; all predate the launch of Instagram and TikTok. But the teens’ pairings draw out themes that transcend generations: Van Pelt’s portrait of Spears, which sparkles when you move around it but looks rather dull when photographed, is shown next to Sabina Ott’s 1989 Portrait: Narcissus, a grisaille painting of a mirror that fails to reflect anything. Both, in the teens’ estimation, function as metaphors for social media, a vehicle for creating and sharing a public identity that ultimately subverts its promises of authenticity and flattens us into one-dimensional personal brands.
The antidote to all that noise can be found next door, in a pair of galleries dedicated to the power pop/punk band the Linda Lindas and their OC forebears, Emily’s Sassy Lime. The latter was a mid-’90s group formed by teen sisters Amy and Wendy Yao and their friend Emily Ryan; the name of the band is a clever palindrome abbreviated as ESL, a tongue-in-cheek nod to racist assumptions the girls had to navigate as young Asian Americans. The story of ESL is wild: They recorded, distributed, promoted, and toured, all without their parents knowing what they were up to. It’s unthinkable today, with everyone’s kid (my own included) wearing GPS devices that make them findable at all times. Parental fear, however well-founded, has its downsides.
The riotous profusion of ESL ephemera and memorabilia that Ryan has dutifully preserved left me buoyant. Every mixtape, zine, concert poster, and fan letter is testament to what the band ultimately accomplished: They carved out a space for themselves, entirely on their own terms, and tapped into and cultivated networks of fellow musicians and creatives, with a punk ethos that requires few resources beyond paper, stamps, and bravado. The parameters and possibilities of technology (and surveillance) will continue to change faster than we can process, but the keys to freedom and joy will always be finding your people and fashioning your own reality, whether you’re thirteen or thirty.
Andrea Gyorody is a Los Angeles–based writer, curator, and art historian.
