Yoko Ono

Before art became something to consume, Yoko Ono imagined it as something you could complete with your own mind. A match burning out. A wish tied to a tree. A simple instruction that turns the viewer from spectator into participant.

That quiet revolution sits at the centre of Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, now open at The Broad in Los Angeles. Running from May 23 to October 11, 2026, the exhibition is Ono’s first solo museum show in Southern California and was organised in collaboration with Tate Modern. It brings together work across instruction pieces, installation, film, music, performance, and activism, tracing more than seven decades of a practice that has often been misunderstood precisely because it was so far ahead of its time. 

Ono’s art has always asked for a different kind of attention. Not the passive stare of the gallery visitor, but something more fragile and active: imagining, touching, writing, listening, participating. Her early instruction works, which began in the mid-1950s, are built from short textual prompts that ask viewers to complete an action physically or mentally. They are part score, part poem, part open door. 

The exhibition includes materials connected to Grapefruit, Ono’s landmark 1964 book of instructions, as well as participatory works such as Painting to Hammer a Nail. Outside the museum, The Broad’s olive trees become Wish Trees for Los Angeles, inviting visitors to attach their own hopes to the branches. It is a simple gesture, but that simplicity is the point: in Ono’s world, peace does not begin as a monument. It begins as a small act repeated by many people. 

There is also a political charge running beneath the tenderness. Ono’s work has never separated imagination from the real world. Her anti-war projects, peace campaigns, feminist gestures, and collaborations around Bed Peace and Acorn Event understand art as a tool for social pressure, emotional repair, and collective refusal.