08 Apr OCCCA at 45: Climate Futures, Balancing Acts, and the Legacy of Art as Resistance
By Tyler Stallings
Celebrating its 45th anniversary, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (OCCCA) affirms its status as a bastion of experimental, socially engaged, and community-rooted art, showcasing over 70 former and current OCCCA artists. OCCCA’s 45th Anniversary Exhibition isn’t just a commemorative exhibition; it’s a living, breathing snapshot of OCCCA’s enduring ethos—raw, collaborative, and ready to confront the most pressing issues of our time, with climate change literally and metaphorically in the air.
The show is an energetic lead-up to OCCCA’s next juried exhibition, which will focus squarely on climate change. This thematic throughline is already palpable in the 45th Anniversary Exhibition, from speculative fictions tucked inside fortune cookies to sculptures built from birthday party trash. Suvan Geer’s Fateful Fortune Cookies: Changing-Climate Prophecies sets a tone of participatory reflection. Visitors break open cookies to discover personalized environmental fates—“Your antidote to climate exhaustion will be wholehearted living”—and are invited to write their own future forecasts in a notebook hung nearby. It’s whimsical, tactile, and unsettling.
Elsewhere, Darlyn Susan Yee’s knitted and stitched wall piece, Climate Change Is Here, spans seven feet in width and proclaims its message with stark immediacy, while Tom Lamb’s aerial photograph, Algae Winter Bloom, Los Angeles River Series, presents environmental degradation as abstract beauty. These works reflect the sensibility that has long defined OCCCA exhibitions: urgent, sometimes political, and almost always thought-provoking.
Ann Phong’s The Leftover Trash from a BD Party #2 is a searing commentary on the environmental costs of celebration and consumption. Lush acrylics swirl around discarded children’s toys and plastic detritus embedded into the canvas like flotsam. It’s part ocean gyre, part cake explosion, and wholly poetic in its warning. That the piece transforms party leftovers into art is a fitting metaphor for OCCCA itself—forever finding meaning and material in the overlooked or discarded.
The climate theme is matched by OCCCA’s commitment to protest and collective action. Robin Repp’s Protest March, a black-and-white infrared photo and video installation, places the viewer among a sea of demonstrators, frozen mid-chant. A white pedestal asks bluntly, “What would you protest now?” and is plastered with handwritten Post-it notes: “Fascists,” “Stop the IDF,” “Medicare for ALL.” The piece fuses past and present, action and invitation. It’s not about a singular issue—it’s about awakening a stance.
This ethos of tension and precarious balance was made literal in Barbara Berk’s performance installation, lining up, presented only during the exhibition’s opening reception (see top image). In the performance, Berk balanced a slender rod on her head while slowly aligning herself with a matching rod affixed to the wall. The act required intense concentration and physical stillness, drawing viewers into a moment of collective breath-holding as they anticipated a potential slip. After the performance, only the wall-mounted rod remained, presumably—its solitary presence a quiet echo of the fragility and precision once enacted. The piece offered a powerful summation of the show’s undercurrent: we are all, quite literally, trying to balance our place in the world, knowing it could all shift in an instant.
The inclusion of George Herms in the exhibition links OCCCA’s present to its roots. His mixed media collage, Heavy, feels both nostalgic and radical, combining text, image, and object into a dense terrain of language and debris. In 1980, while briefly teaching at Cal State Fullerton, Herms urged five frustrated MFA students (Suvan Geer being one of them) to “Start your own gallery” when they couldn’t find a venue for installation and experimental work. They took his advice—founding OCCCA, which has since presented over 500 exhibitions and featured more than 2,000 artists across four and a half decades.
The mid-1990s marked a pivotal moment in OCCCA’s history when it moved into its current 6,300-square-foot home—a former used car dealership in downtown Santa Ana. The space, located in what would become the Santa Ana Artists Village, came with unexpected challenges, including oil pits beneath the floor that had to be drained and filled with sand. This gritty transformation exemplifies the DIY spirit that has defined OCCCA throughout its evolution, even in the absence of institutional funding or administrative safety nets.
For over four decades, OCCCA has remained fiercely committed to its founding mission: experimental, accessible, and bold. With free admission, volunteer-driven curation, and a consistent stream of exhibitions tackling provocative themes—mass incarceration, the surveillance state, post-truth culture—it has helped anchor the Santa Ana Arts District and draw in diverse audiences. The fact that it continues to operate entirely through unpaid labor is both a testament to its passion and a limitation on its future growth.
As OCCCA approaches its 50th anniversary, there’s hope it will receive the tangible support needed to preserve its legacy and expand its impact—whether through salaried staff, institutional partnerships, or grant funding. Formal archiving, artist residencies, and a robust digital presence could cement its role in Southern California art history. Ideally, the anniversary exhibition will feature archival materials that illuminate OCCCA’s rich and often under-documented past. With the right backing, this already-impressive artist-run space could evolve into something even more sustainable and enduring.
That OCCCA has managed to produce ambitious programming like this while being entirely volunteer-run is both a marvel and a mystery. The artists, curators, and administrators keep the lights on, the walls full, and the doors open (always free to the public), without a paid staff. Jeffrey Frisch, the current executive director, is himself an artist and formerly directed the art program at the Orange County Airport—just one example of the deep artistic investment behind OCCCA’s operations. As an artist-run space,
OCCCA thrives on the dedication of its member artists, who not only curate but also regularly participate in exhibitions. Kudos is due for all this unpaid work, which continues to fuel the gallery’s experimental edge. But as the institution looks ahead to its 50th anniversary, one can’t help but wish that it could secure at least one or two salaried positions to sustain its legacy and build deeper infrastructure.
Despite such constraints, the gallery’s reach has been significant. OCCCA provides free art classes for elementary students in the Santa Ana Unified School District, invites collaboration from underserved artists, and remains a beloved venue not only for exhibitions but for performances, lectures, and even weddings. Its inclusivity has made it a haven for women artists, BIPOC artists, LGBTQIA+ artists, and incarcerated artists—communities that are often sidelined in mainstream contemporary art venues.
In OCCCA’s 45th Anniversary Exhibition, the story of this institution is told not through a single voice but through a chorus. Works like Geer’s interactive fortunes, Phong’s sculptural castaways, Repp’s protest documentation, Berk’s meditative balance, and Herms’ historic assemblage form a mosaic of urgency and endurance. Each piece is its own forecast, its own call to attention, and, ultimately, its own offering to a future that must still be imagined—and made.
As one visitor wrote in Geer’s prophecy book: “I’m going to learn how to grow my own food and share it with people.”
For OCCCA, fate isn’t something to await—it’s something to create.
OCCCA’s 45th Anniversary Exhibition
April 5 – May 17, 2025
Orange County Center for Contemporary Art
117 North Sycamore Street
Santa Ana, CA 92701
Tyler Stallings is a writer, filmmaker, artist, and curator based in Southern California. With over 30 years of experience, he has contributed to and edited numerous books and catalogs, offering insightful scholarship in contemporary art. To learn more about his work, visit www.tylerstallings.com.
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