Huntington Beach has long been branded by waves and asphalt—surf breaks, skate decks, sun-bleached hair, and a tan so permanent it very well counts as ID. But mere blocks from Main Street’s flip-flop bacchanal, the Huntington Beach Art Center is carving out a different mark. This year, the HBAC turns thirty years old, and instead of blowing out candles, it’s throwing down with Personal Data: What is a Portrait?—on view between September 6th and November 8th, it is an exhibition that asks what happens when we stop looking at ourselves in the mirror and start seeing ourselves in each other.

Curated by Steve Galindo, and haunted by Félix González-Torres’ candy-spill portraits, the show throws portraiture into the blender. Tracy Emin, Rafa Esparza, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Lauren Halsey, Vanessa German, Allison Hueman, Vita Kari, and a cast of twenty more remix the genre across murals, digital experiments, sculpture, and fleeting installations that last as long as your glance. Portraits here aren’t stiff oil paintings—they’re living, temporary, viral, vulnerable.

Dan Faltz, HBAC’s Senior Cultural Arts Supervisor, puts it bluntly: “We are wired to recognize a face within weeks of being born. Personal Data asks us: are we searching for ourselves in a portrait, or for someone we already know? And what does it mean when that recognition is instantaneous, maybe even automated?”

That edge between human instinct and technological mediation is where the show resides. Portraiture used to be a flex of wealth; now it’s democratized, memed, filtered, uploaded. The exhibition makes that leap palpable, weaving together Indigenous practices, communal storytelling, and contemporary materiality. Impermanence and empathy become the brushstrokes.

For a city synonymous with the U.S. Open of Surfing, HBAC has always been a sly countercurrent—hosting shows for veterans, youth, graffiti artists, and creators who’ve lived through incarceration. Thirty years in, it still feels restless, surfacing voices and visuals that belong as much to the neighborhood as to the global art conversation.

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