The 2025 California Biennial Is Trapped in the Past

The 2025 California Biennial Is Trapped in the Past

COSTA MESA, California — As a former teenage suburbanite, I arrived at the Orange County Museum of Art’s California Biennial, Desperate, Scared, But Social, with excitement. I expected to feel kinship with the theme, which revolves around adolescence and the feelings, identity, and sense of the world that mature from it. Instead, I was underwhelmed by its shallow curiosity about today’s teenagers, and the exhibition’s stunted growth.The biennial…