A Sweeping Yoko Ono Retrospective Aims to Make Music in Museumgoers' Minds

The exhibition spotlights more than 200 works by the 92-year-old artist, from provocative early works to more recent creations

Ella Feldman - Daily Correspondent

November 12, 2025 4:14 p.m.

Yoko Ono with Half-a-Room, 1967 Clay Perry via Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

“The only sound that exists to me is the sound of the mind,” Yoko Ono, the trailblazing Japanese multimedia artist and world peace advocate, wrote in 1966. “My works are only to induce music of the mind in people.”

That statement of purpose inspired the name of the massive retrospective on Ono’s career, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” which is on view at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art through February 22, 2026. The exhibition was previously on display at Tate Modern in London, and it will travel to The Broad in Los Angeles in the spring.

“Music of the Mind” presents more than 200 works from seven decades of Ono’s career, from her early avant-garde creations to large-scale installations from recent decades, making it one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of her work ever.

“The exhibition will really open a lot of eyes, so people will realize how much Yoko Ono has done for the arts,” Tatsu Aoki, a Chicago-based musician and filmmaker who has collaborated with Ono, tells Chicago magazine’s Web Behrens.

Born in Tokyo in 1933, Ono moved to New York when she was 18 to attend Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied poetry and musical composition. By the ’60s, she was involved in New York City’s arts scene, including the experimental art and performance collective Fluxus.

During this period, she collaborated with musicians like John Cage, Ornette Coleman and John Lennon, whom she married in 1969—a relationship that catapulted her into international fame. She created art, music, performances and conceptual works with Lennon for a decade and continued long after his murder in 1980.

A 16-millimeter film still from Yoko Ono's Fly, 1970-71 Yoko Ono via Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

“Music of the Mind” unfolds mostly chronologically. It includes many of Ono’s iconic, provocative early works, such as Cut Piece, Ono’s 1964 performance in which she invited her audience to cut away pieces of her clothing as she knelt on the ground.

The exhibition also features a screening of Fly, a short film Ono directed and scored with Lennon that shows a housefly crawling around a woman’s naked body, and of Film No. 4 (Bottoms), an 80-minute film that presents a “procession of nude bottoms of every shape, sway and swagger,” as the Museum of Modern Art describes it.

The film got an X rating from the British Board of Film Censors in 1967, giving it even more media attention.

The exhibition features a number of Ono’s “participatory instruction” works, which allow visitors to take part directly in her art, according to a statement from the museum. “Something that’s central to Ono’s work is that she gives permission,” Korina Hernandez, a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art, tells Axios’ Carrie Shepherd.

“So here you have permission to really engage her creativity and engage with her work in a way that you usually can’t in museums.”

Quick facts: Other examples of instructions in Yoko Ono’s art

• Instruction for Paintings (1962) doesn’t feature any paintings, just instructions for how to make them. 

• Grapefruit (1964) is a collection of concise, poetic texts, each inviting its reader to create a work of art either literally or in their mind.

In “Music of the Mind,” Ono gives visitors permission to hammer a nail into a white canvas (Painting to Hammer a Nail), climb inside a black cloth bag (Bag Piece), piece together remnants of broken ceramics (Mend Piece) and play chess (White Chess Set).

Audience interaction is also an element present in more recent works featured in Ono’s retrospective. Her 2004 installation My Mommy Is Beautiful invites visitors to reflect honestly on their relationships with their mothers, then jot down those reflections on a small notecard. Add Color (Refugee Boat) (1960/2016) asks attendees to scribble their inner hopes and thoughts onto a white boat and the white walls that surround it.

Yoko Ono's Secret Piece (1953), from typescripts for Grapefruit Yoko Ono via Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

“[Ono] has inspired generations of audiences to think differently about the everyday and seeing art,” Jamillah James, a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, says in the statement. “It is an honor to host this wide-ranging exhibition, which is a critical opportunity that invites the public to deeply engage with Ono’s many important contributions to visual art in new and exciting ways.”

Ono might be best known for the bed-ins she staged with Lennon in 1969 as the Vietnam War raged on. For more than half a century, peace has remained an essential theme in Ono’s art. The word appears directly in works like 2003’s Imagine Peace and 2017’s Peace Is Power, both of which are on display in “Music of the Mind.”

“Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago through February 22, 2026. It will then travel to The Broad in Los Angeles, where it will be on view from May 23 to October 11, 2026.

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