Yoko Ono will stage her first solo museum exhibition in Southern California on the Broad museum this spring. The legendary 92-year-old artist, activist and spouse of John Lennon is ready to open her present, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Thoughts,” on Might 23. The interactive exhibition, organized in collaboration with Tate Trendy in London, will run by Oct. 11, 2026, the Broad introduced Thursday.
One of many first issues company will see once they strategy the museum throughout Ono’s present shall be an outside set up created utilizing the Broad’s olive timber from its out of doors plaza. These shall be reworked into “want timber” for the town — a nod to an set up that Ono first created in 1996 at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica. Viewers shall be invited to put in writing needs on tags and fasten them to the branches.
Yoko Ono, “Peace Is Energy,” Tate Trendy, Blavatnik Constructing, 2024.
(Oliver Cowling / Tate)
“Yoko’s work has by no means been certain by place or time, however this actually looks like the precise second for a present like this in Los Angeles,” Ono’s studio director, Connor Monahan, wrote in an e-mail. “Her work transforms audiences from observers into contributors, serving to to form the works and the exhibition itself. That sense of company and connection feels particularly highly effective proper now, and I feel Los Angeles, with its spirit of experimentation and openness, will actually embrace that.”
Ono has been a riveting, beloved and typically controversial pressure within the worlds of music, artwork and popular culture because the early Sixties when she turned related to New York’s John Cage-inspired Fluxus motion — shaped by a group of experimental artists who primarily based their work in efficiency follow and avant-garde rules.
From the beginning, Ono’s artwork was performative and interactive. It was additionally knowledgeable by the trauma of dwelling in Tokyo throughout World Warfare II, an expertise that may feed her lifelong dedication to peace, love and understanding between folks and communities.
Her positivity famously resonated with Lennon upon their first assembly in 1966 at London’s Indica Gallery the place Ono was establishing an exhibition of conceptual, interactive artwork. One of many items featured a ladder with a magnifying glass on the prime. When Lennon climbed the ladder and seemed by the magnifying glass, he made out the phrase “sure,” written in small letters on a canvas hooked up to the ceiling.
“So it was constructive. I felt relieved. It’s an ideal reduction once you stand up the ladder and also you look by the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘f— you’ or one thing, it mentioned ‘sure,’” Lennon mentioned in an interview with Folks about his first assembly with Ono.
“Mattress-In” on the Amsterdam Hilton, Netherlands, 1969.
(Henry Pessar / Yoko Ono)
“Yoko Ono’s concepts about peace, creativeness and collective participation are each timeless and newly pressing at a second when division appears to dominate each information cycle, and communities right here and all over the world resiliently construct towards a greater future,” Joanne Heyler, founding director and president of the Broad, mentioned in an e-mail. “The multidisciplinary and wide-ranging follow she started greater than 70 years in the past stays strikingly up to date, because the boundaries between artwork, music and efficiency are, in her palms, challenged and reshaped, creating recent emotional connection.”
Heyler additionally famous that the museum rearranged its calendar to make room for Ono’s present as a way to “rapidly carry its well timed themes to L.A.”
The Broad present will function Ono’s interactive “instruction” reveals from the mid-Fifties to the current. These items function transient texts that counsel actions for company to finish or ponder. Viewers may even see the typescript drafts for her 1964 e-book, “Grapefruit,” which incorporates greater than 200 directions in the type of music, portray, occasions, poetry and objects.
Ono’s work as an activist may even be highlighted by supplies and ephemera utilized in her peace campaigns, together with protests performed in collaboration with Lennon resembling “Acorn Occasion” (1968) and “Mattress Peace” (1969), through which the husband and spouse staged bed-in occasions in Amsterdam and Montreal the place they sat in mattress and took questions from the press in an effort to talk out towards the Vietnam Warfare.
“Reduce Piece,” 1964, carried out in “New Works of Yoko Ono,” Carnegie Corridor, New York. Filmed by David and Albert Maysles, movie, 16mm, black and white, and sound (stereo), 8 min, 27 sec.
(Yoko Ono)
There may even be loads of movie and video within the exhibition, together with footage of “Reduce Piece,” a legendary piece of efficiency artwork first staged in 1964 at Yamaichi Corridor, Kyoto, through which Ono sat quietly whereas the viewers minimize away items of her clothes.
“With so many creatives calling it house, Los Angeles is the right place to honor Ono’s boundary-pushing follow and enduring imaginative and prescient,” Sarah Loyer, Broad curator and exhibitions supervisor, wrote in an e-mail. “Ono’s work from the Fifties to at this time asks us to take a look at the world in another way and discover methods to make change, usually beginning inside ourselves, towards peace. In Ono’s work, private tales and collective motion come collectively in ways in which I feel will actually resonate with Angelenos.”
