DOWNTOWN — A comprehensive, touring exhibit of Yoko Ono’s art opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art this weekend, spanning about 70 years of work and featuring 200 pieces, including large installations, a music room, film, photography and interactive art.

“Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” opened last year at the Tate Modern in London and is making an exclusive U.S. stop in Chicago. It opens Saturday and runs through Feb. 22 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.

While many people may know Ono as a public figure and musician, Jamillah James, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Manilow senior curator, hopes this exhibit shows people the breadth and depth of her career and life as an artist.

“This exhibition is really a fantastic capsule of the tremendous body of work that [Ono] has across media,” she said. “I would love for people to come to the exhibition with an open mind [and] set aside any preconceived options that they might have about Yoko and really just engage with the incredible intellectual work that she’s done, which is centered in encouraging people to imagine, to think, to perform, to engage with the world around them.”

“PEACE is POWER” by Yoko Ono features walls and windows covered with the phrase in dozens of languages. Credit: Filipe Braga

The exhibit is arranged chronologically across several rooms — following Ono from New York to Tokyo to London and then back to New York, James said. It opens with instruction paintings, which are text-based works written in Japanese with an English counterpart, telling the viewer how to create a piece of art.

For example, in “Smoke Painting,” Ono tells viewers to “light canvas or any finished painting with a cigarette for any length of time. See the smoke movement. The painting ends when the whole canvas or painting is gone.”

That concept of collaboration and participation is a central theme in Ono’s artwork, James said. In other works, Ono invites people to shake hands through a canvas, hammer a nail into the surface of a painting and write their thoughts and ideas on a wall.

In Ono’s “Helmets (Pieces of Sky),” an installation from 2001, she invites viewers to take a puzzle piece from helmets hanging from the ceiling, “referencing the violent fragmenting of hope through war.”

Yoko Ono’s “Helmets (Pieces of Sky)” is an installation from 2001 which invites viewers to take a puzzle piece from helmets hanging from the ceiling, “referencing the violent fragmenting of hope through war.” Credit: Provided

“Performance is so central to Yoko’s work over the years that I think that is a primary through line,” James said. “It really activates the viewer, in a way.”

The exhibit also showcases Ono’s collaborative spirit with other artists, working with Japanese filmmakers on pieces like “Aos,” a short film from 1964, and her partners Anthony Cox and John Lennon.

While this show was originally organized by Tate Modern Curator Juliet Bingham and Patrizia Dander, Gropius Bau’s deputy director of curatorial affairs, James made her own additions to Chicago’s iteration.

James was introduced to Ono through her music, so the exhibit features a slightly expansive music room, where people can lounge on bean bag chairs while listening to her songs.

“Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” opened at Tate Modern in London last year and has also been displayed at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. Credit: Provided

James also added gallery performances, activations of Ono’s 1964 book “Grapefruit” and various participatory artworks. For example, “Mend Piece” from 1966 allows visitors to assemble broken ceramics, like mugs and saucers, and place them on shelves.

“This exhibition is an important one. It has been some time since there’s been a major presentation of Yoko’s work in the United States,” James said. “There are many points of entry with this exhibition, for people who are less acquainted with Yoko’s work and people that are super fans, they’ll find something to really engage with. … I think it demands repeated viewings, but it is a really fantastic testament to the power of the imagination [and] of people to enact small changes in the world.

“This is a very timely exhibition with everything that’s happening in the world and right now in Chicago, too.”

As visitors make their way through, the final piece they’ll come across is “Sky TV,” which showcases a live feed of the sky above the gallery it’s being displayed in. The piece is meant to mimic a window. Ono created the work because she lived in a windowless New York apartment.

James thought it was “a nice way to end the exhibition,” she said.

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s iteration of “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” closes with “Sky TV,” which is a live feed of the sky above the museum. Credit: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture G

While Ono does have some ties to Chicago — her first permanent artwork in America, the “Sky Landing” sculpture, sits in Jackson Park, and her song “Walking on Thin Ice” was in part inspired by visiting Chicago and seeing Lake Michigan — her presence here is “muted,” James said.

Bringing such a massive exhibit to Chicago is “a serious responsibility” and one that aligns with the Museum of Contemporary Art’s history, James said.

“This institution, its foundations were built on performance,” she said. “We were a very early supporter of artists working in conceptualism and performance art. There were Fluxus-related events at the MCA, Dick Higgins and Allison Knowles had early interactions with the MCA. … So this show is very much aligned with our history as an institution and our deep support of major art historical figures.

“Chicago is a town that has many, many creative artists working here … so it just feels at home here.”

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