There’s no blueprint for a museum retrospective when the featured artist’s practice relies profoundly on the immaterial—the prompt, the score, the idea. Such was the task for curators at the Broad with Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, the first solo museum exhibition in Southern California for the visionary artist, musician, and activist. Ultimately, the themes within Yoko Ono’s work organized the sprawling materials into a focused presentation on human responsibility, to one another and to the planet.
The exhibition spans seven decades of a genre-defying career that began long before Ono (now 93) and her very public private life became cultural mythology. The Broad effectively issues a critical correction: positioning the artist as an idea generator, a foundational architect of early conceptualism and the international Fluxus movement. “Yoko really is not an object maker in the same way that we think of visual artists,” says Ed Patuto, director of audience engagement at the Broad. “[She] started out as a musician, and it’s been central to her whole life.”
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Born in Tokyo in 1933, Ono experienced a childhood fractured by World War II, an event that informed a subsequent worldview built on the ideals of peace and hope. She received classical piano training as a young child, attending the avant-garde Jiyu-Gakuen music academy for preschool. By the mid-1950s, when Ono moved to Manhattan, this crucible had crystallized into a philosophy that prefigured decades of contemporary practice: That is, art does not require the physical luxury of a studio or a gallery because it can exist entirely within the mind of the individual. This notion of radical interiority informed Ono’s earliest instruction pieces—those short, poetic texts outlining actions for the viewer to perform or contemplate, presented at the Broad in the rare typescript drafts from her seminal 1964 book, Grapefruit. “Listen to the sound of the Earth turning,” Ono writes in the book’s index-card texts, directing readers to the space between poem and performance.
Rather than treat Grapefruit and other works as static relics, the exhibition encourages audience participation. Visitors percuss nails into boards for Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961); participate in the immersive, ever-expanding blue text-graffiti of boat and wall that cocreates Add Colour (Refugee Boat) (1960/2016); take a blue and cloudy puzzle piece home from the installation Helmets (Pieces of Sky) (2001); and contribute to a new version of Ono’s famous Wish Tree (1996), a peripatetic installation re-creating a tradition of Eastern prayer.
The retrospective’s thorough, decade-by-decade examination also dismantles the media-driven biases that obscured Ono’s independent achievements. Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager at the Broad, points out a purposeful curatorial choice: The John Lennon collaboration doesn’t appear until halfway through the physical exhibition, precisely mirroring the trajectory of Ono’s already established, highly independent career. “She was the first so many times over,” says Loyer. “The first woman to attend Gakushuin University in Tokyo as a philosophy student and the only woman invited to present at London’s monthlong Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966.” Living in New York City in the ’60s, she kept the company of that era’s defining avant-garde artists—John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Nam June Paik. Part of the museum’s objective, explains Patuto, is to peel back the layers of celebrity—“to make obvious the influences,” he says.
Crucially, the institutional framework and location of the exhibition expands beyond the physical walls of the museum to meet a contemporary Los Angeles audience experiencing its own moment of heightened civic engagement. For the show’s May 23 opening, a series of billboards along the Sunset Strip and Hollywood Boulevard will broadcast Ono’s mantras: “THINK PEACE, ACT PEACE, SPREAD PEACE, IMAGINE PEACE” and “PEACE is POWER.” This activation refers to the iconic 1969 “WAR IS OVER! If You Want It” multimedia campaign Ono launched with Lennon that occupied a West Hollywood billboard, also on Sunset Boulevard and near the iconic Chateau Marmont. Loyer draws parallels between the billboard series and the work of activist artists like Barbara Kruger. “I think the political aspect of the work will really resonate with visitors,” Loyer says. “She really invites you to use first your mind and then your actions to affect positive change in the world.”
This energetic exchange between artist and viewer deepens with presentations at REDCAT theater, a block from the Broad, where performance artist MPA will enact the startling vulnerability of Cut Piece (1964), kneeling motionless onstage while audience members use scissors to cut away portions of her clothing, an intense investigation into power dynamics and audience complicity. The filmed documentation of Ono’s original performance will also play in the show, a recording that has become a cornerstone of feminist art history. On July 18 and 19, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will perform Sky Piece to Jesus Christ (1965), in which a classical-music ensemble is progressively mummified in gauze until the musicians can no longer physically play their instruments, a characteristically dark, humorous exploration of collective silence.
But the exhibition’s deepest emotional currents can be found in the profound celebration of Ono’s musical legacy, culminating in a series of live performances curated by musician and producer Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto). This programming includes a presentation of the still-in-progress I Am Yoko, a multimedia musical currently in development by Honda and conceptual artist Glenn Kaino. Featuring vocals by German singer Theo Bleckmann and Ono’s granddaughter, Emi Helfrich, alongside cellist Maggie Parkins, the project deliberately centers the artist’s personal history, philosophies, and enduring resilience.
To ensure that performances adhere to Ono’s protocols, the Broad’s curatorial team collaborated closely with the artist’s studio representatives, including director Connor Monahan and archivist and collaborator Jon Hendricks, to preserve Ono’s vision even amid iterative versions of her works. By regrounding an artist whose celebrity—rather than her creativity or humanity—has been scrutinized for decades, the I Am Yoko musical, like the entire exhibition, invites the public to finally listen to the mind of a visionary master artist. Patuto remarks, “It really is about giving people a window that very few have had into who Yoko is as a person.”•
YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND
May 23–October 11, 2026
The Broad
221 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles
Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, a curator, and an author based in downtown Los Angeles. Formerly the arts editor at LA Weekly, now a cofounder of 13ThingsLA, she is the recipient of the Rabkin Prize, the Mozaik Future Art Writers Award, and the Los Angeles Press Club’s Critic of the Year award (twice). Her novella, Zen Psychosis, was published in 2020.
