The Tamesis
In 1971, Yoko Ono placed an advertisement in a local newspaper announcing a women’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. However, when visitors arrived at the exhibition, they saw a small sign at the entrance. It explains that Ono released the flies on the museum grounds and invited the public to follow them through the city. Ultimately, no approved exhibition was held inside. Instead, Ono stationed photographers around the building to ask visitors what they thought of the exhibition.
Their reactions become the artwork itself. While some people raved about the non-existent exhibit, others immediately began trying to decipher what it all meant. Many people directly dismissed Ono, with one calling her “crazy.” But in the grainy footage documenting the intervention, one viewer reacts with pure joy: a child. When the interviewer asked what he would think if the exhibition existed only in his imagination, the boy laughed. “Then there’s a really good museum there,” he said. “That’s real Nito.”
The clip, now playing in “Yoko Ono: Music of the Soul” at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, functions less as an archival piece than as a key to understanding Ono’s entire practice. “Music of the Soul,” on view through October 11, is the artist, musician, and activist’s first solo museum exhibition in Southern California, looking back on Ono’s early work and spanning conceptual art, music, film, installation, directed work, and events.
“Yoko has a lot of work that is not represented in the show and could never be represented in the show,” said Connor Monahan, her studio director of nearly two decades. “No one show can truly encompass all of Yoko’s work.”
This performance at the Broad comes amid a cultural reimagining of Ono’s legacy. Yoko Ono has long been viewed by the public as either a ridiculous avant-garde provocateur or simply “the woman who broke up the Beatles,” but today she is widely regarded as one of the foundational figures of conceptual and performance art. Music of the Soul underscores this point, positioning Ono not as a cultural footnote or curiosity, but as one of the most iconic artistic visionaries of the last century.
“Yoko was filled with relentless optimism,” Monahan said. “A lot of people wouldn’t go on to create more work if they were exposed to this kind of public criticism. But she never broke down.” He pointed to one of Ono’s long-held philosophies: “Believe in yourself and you will change the world.”
Monaghan added: “Imagination is not secondary to the work; imagination is the work.” Kids outside MoMA instinctively embraced the idea.
Ono began to view imagination as nourishment early on. During World War II, at age 12, she and her family were evacuated from Tokyo and sought refuge in the Japanese countryside. Food was scarce there, so Ono and her brother Keisuke would lie on their backs, look up at the sky, and exchange “aerial menus”—imagining eating elaborate meals together. Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager at the Broad, describes these moments as “trusting imagination as a way of survival.” Ono later considered her imaginary feasts to be some of her first works of art.
After returning to Tokyo, Ono enrolled in Gakushuin University in 1952, becoming the school’s first female philosophy student, and then moved to the United States in 1953 to attend Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied poetry and music composition.
By the early 1960s, Ono was deeply integrated into downtown New York’s avant-garde art scene, staging experimental performances and instructional works in a Chamber Street loft and stimulating the curiosity of figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Peggy Guggenheim, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Rauschenberg.
