Explore Yoko Ono's first solo museum exhibition in Southern California, Music of the Mind at The Broad, which reframes her legacy as a foundational conceptual artist through early works, instruction pieces, and participatory installations.
In 1971, Yoko Ono placed advertisements in local newspapers announcing a one-woman exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. When visitors arrived for the exhibit, they encountered a small sign outside the entrance explaining that Ono had released flies onto the museum grounds and invited the public to follow them through the city.
There was no sanctioned exhibition inside; instead, Ono stationed cameramen around the building's perimeter to ask visitors what they thought of the show. Their reactions became the artwork itself. While some people performatively raved about the nonexistent exhibition, others immediately began trying to decode its meaning. Many dismissed Ono outright, with one person calling her bonkers.
But in the grainy footage documenting the intervention, one viewer responded with pure delight: a child. When the interviewer asked what he would think if the exhibition existed only in his imagination, the boy broke into a grin and said, Then you have a very good museum there. That's real neato.
This piece, titled Museum of Modern Art, is now on view at The Broad in Los Angeles as part of Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, where it functions less like archival footage and more as a key to understanding Ono's entire practice. Running through October 11, 2026, the exhibition is the artist, musician, and activist's first solo museum show in Southern California. It surveys much of Ono's early work, spanning conceptual art, music, film, installation, instruction pieces, and activism.
Connor Monahan, Ono's studio director of nearly two decades, notes that Yoko has a very large universe of work that's not represented in the show, and couldn't be. There's no one show that could really encompass all of Yoko's work. The exhibition arrives amid a cultural reframing of Ono's legacy.
Long dismissed by the public as either an absurd avant-garde provocateur or simply the woman who broke up The Beatles, Ono is now widely understood to be one of the foundational figures of conceptual and performance art. Music of the Mind underscores this, positioning Ono not as a cultural footnote or curiosity, but as one of the defining artistic visionaries of the last century.
Monahan emphasizes Ono's relentless optimism: Many people, if they received that kind of public criticism, wouldn't continue to make more work. But she was never broken by that. He points to one of Ono's longtime philosophies: Believe in yourself and you'll change the world. Imagination is not secondary to the work; it is the work, Monahan adds, an idea that the child outside MoMA instinctively embraced.
Ono's understanding of imagination as nourishment began early. At 12 years old, after being evacuated from Tokyo during World War II, she and her family took refuge in the Japanese countryside. Food was scarce there, so Ono and her younger brother Keisuke would lie on their backs, looking up at the sky and exchanging menus in the air, imagining elaborate meals together.
Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager at The Broad, describes those moments as a belief in one's imagination as a mode of survival. Ono later considered her fantasized feasts among her first works of art. After returning to Tokyo, Ono enrolled at Gakushuin University in 1952, becoming the school's first female philosophy student before moving to the United States in 1953 and attending Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied poetry and musical composition.
By the early 1960s, Ono had become deeply embedded in New York's downtown avant-garde scene, staging experimental performances and instruction-based works out of her Chambers Street loft. Music of the Mind opens with three iterations of Lighting Piece (1955), comprising a simple instruction reading: Light a match and watch till it goes out. Nearby are photographs of Ono performing the work, and a black-and-white film of her striking a match in hypnotic slow motion.
Elsewhere in the galleries are original typescript pages from Grapefruit, Ono's landmark 1964 book of instruction works, which invited audiences to listen to the sound of the earth turning, draw a map to get lost, and simply fly. When Ono was asked in a 1971 interview why she wrote the book, she replied: You see, we live and we die. In between that we eat and sleep and walk around, but that's not enough for us.
We have to act out our madness in order to be sane. A few rooms into the show, there is a large white canvas punctured with nails. Some have single strands of human hair tied around them, referencing her instruction work Hair Piece: Pick up a single hair that falls out when combing in the morning.
Whenever a participant hammers another nail into the canvas, each strike sends a cavernous boom reverberating through the gallery, startling nearby visitors before drawing them in to try it for themselves. This participatory element exemplifies Ono's belief that the audience completes the artwork, a principle that has influenced generations of artists and remains central to her enduring legacy
Yoko Ono Music Of The Mind The Broad Conceptual Art Imagination
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