Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at The Broad is Onos first LA museum show, unfolding May 23October 11, 2026 with a season of multi-arts media programming and seven digital antiwar billboards across Los Angeles. The retrospective revisits touchstones from across her practice while inviting participation and noise from visitors.
Works that ask you to do something
Hands-on encounters are central here. Painting to Hammer a Nail, sometimes shown elsewhere behind barriers, is open at The Broad to actual hammering. Nearby, a small Refugee Boat and surrounding walls take on layers of blue-marker drawings; blank canvases accept mom-inspired sentences and photographs of visitors mothers; shadows overlap on a vast scrim; and on the museum grounds, tags bearing written wishes accumulate on Wish Trees. Onos 1966 installation Apple appears again the same work that once enraged her when John Lennon took a bite of the green fruit. Smiles are for shopkeepers, she once snapped at photographers, a stance that throws the couples 1968 film Smile 52 slow-motion minutes of Lennons grin into an especially wry relief.
Historic performances are threaded through the season. On July 18 and July 19, 2026, The Broads alliance with REDCAT restages Cut Piece and Wrapping Piece back-to-back. Los Angelesbased artist MPA will appear in Cut Piece, first debuted by Ono in Kyoto in 1964, where audience members used scissors to remove the artists clothing. Sky Piece to Jesus Christ features the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) gradually swaddled in gauze until their instruments fall silent, echoing Onos 1961 invitation in Wrapping Piece to be wrapped …until I disappear.
Reframing a legacy
Onos 1967 Half-a-Wind exhibition, premiered at Lisson Gallery in Marylebone, London, reappears here as a line of empty glass apothecary jars labeled in her finely scaled handwriting. She has linked the work to estrangement from her then-husband and later described …a half-empty space in my life, adding in 2015 that people are just half. Elsewhere, a German army helmet heaped with sky-jigsaw pieces states its case bluntly, while white chessboards with two sets of white pieces press their point more quietly. Ono has said she went from bitch to witch in the celebrity story told about her, a label-swap punctuated by the resolute openness of her tiny 1966 Yes at Londons Indica Gallery.
Film also hums beneath the surface. FLY (1970/1971), directed by Yoko Ono & John Lennon with a score and soundtrack by the pair, lingers for 25 minutes in 16mm color and mono sound. And the life behind the art is never far away: from wartime childhood hunger to the 1980 murder of Lennon, Ono has called imagination her lifeline. Today, at 93 and living in seclusion, she is reintroduced here as anything but a relic.
Vía artandcakela.com
