In 1971, Yoko Ono placed ads in local newspapers announcing a one-woman exhibition at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art. When visitors arrived, however, they encountered a small sign outside the entrance. It explained that Ono had released flies onto the museum grounds\u2014and invited the public to follow them through the city. There was, in the end, no sanctioned exhibition inside; instead, Ono stationed cameramen around the building\u2019s perimeter to ask visitors what they thought of the show.<\/p>\n
Their reactions became the artwork itself. While some people performatively raved about the nonexistent exhibition, others immediately began trying to decode what it all meant. Many dismissed Ono outright, with one person calling her bonkers. But in the grainy footage documenting the intervention, one viewer responds with pure delight: a child. When the interviewer asks what he would think if the exhibition existed only in his imagination, the boy breaks into a grin. \u201cThen you have a very good museum there,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s real neato.\u201d<\/p>\n
That clip now plays inside \u201cYoko Ono: Music of the Mind\u201d<\/a> at The Broad in Los Angeles, where it functions less like archival footage than as a key to understanding Ono\u2019s entire practice. Running through October 11, \u201cMusic of the Mind\u201d is the artist, musician, and activist\u2019s first solo museum exhibition in Southern California and surveys much of Ono\u2019s early work, spanning conceptual art, music, film, installation, instruction pieces, and activism.<\/p>\n \u201cYoko has a very large universe of work that\u2019s not represented in the show and couldn\u2019t be,\u201d says her studio director of nearly two decades, Connor Monahan. \u201cThere\u2019s no one show that could really encompass all of Yoko\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n The show at The Broad arrives amid a cultural reframing of Ono\u2019s legacy. Long dismissed by the public as either an absurd avant-garde provocateur or simply \u201cthe woman who broke up the Beatles,\u201d Ono is now widely understood to be one of the foundational figures of conceptual and performance art. \u201cMusic of the Mind\u201d underscores that, positioning Ono not as a cultural footnote or curiosity, but as one of the defining artistic visionaries of the last century.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a relentless optimism with Yoko,\u201d says Monahan. \u201cMany people, if they received that kind of public criticism, wouldn\u2019t continue to make more work. But she was never broken by that.\u201d He points to one of Ono\u2019s longtime philosophies: \u201cBelieve in yourself, and you\u2019ll change the world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cImagination is not secondary to the work\u2014it is the work,\u201d Monahan adds\u2014an idea that the child outside MoMA instinctively embraced.<\/p>\n Ono\u2019s 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 \u201cmenus in the air\u201d\u2014imagining elaborate meals together. Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager at The Broad, describes those moments as \u201ca belief in one\u2019s imagination as a mode of survival.\u201d Ono later considered her fantasized feasts among her first works of art.<\/p>\n After returning to Tokyo, Ono enrolled at Gakushuin University in 1952, becoming the school\u2019s first female philosophy student. She then moved to the United States in 1953 and attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied poetry and musical composition.<\/p>\n By the early 1960s, Ono had become deeply embedded in New York\u2019s downtown avant-garde scene, staging experimental performances and instruction-based works out of her Chambers Street loft and piquing the curiosity of figures such as Marcel Duchamp<\/a>, Peggy Guggenheim, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Rauschenberg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1971, Yoko Ono placed ads in local newspapers announcing a one-woman exhibition at New York\u2019s Museum of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":703964,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75,21762,343],"class_list":["post-703963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-textabovecenterfullbleed","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/703964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}