iThe BroadDowntown
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind
This exhibition has ended.
Ono's first solo museum show in Southern California, with Tate Modern: seven decades of instruction pieces you complete yourself, from Wish Trees to Cut Piece.
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Somewhere in the gallery someone is hammering. Painting to Hammer a Nail invites visitors to drive nails into the work, and Time Out notes the intermittent noise carries through the room. It is also the piece Time Out credits with bringing Ono and John Lennon together.
This is Ono's first solo museum show in Southern California, organised with Tate Modern, and most of it is instructions you carry out yourself. You draw in blue marker on Add Colour (Refugee Boat), write notes about your mother, and take a blue puzzle piece home from Helmets. Curator Sarah Loyer points out that Lennon only appears halfway through. You will hammer more here than you have on the shelf still leaning against your living room wall.
Time Out gave it four stars, and warned it probably won't change the opinion of Ono you arrived with. It closes 11 October. Tickets were $21 per Time Out, and Thursdays 5 to 8pm are free with timed tickets.
Editor's pick
Seven decades of instruction pieces you finish yourself, from the Wish Trees to Cut Piece, in Ono's first solo museum show in Southern California. Instructions more rewarding to follow than any flat-pack wardrobe's.
Look for
Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961/1966)
A painting you hammer nails into, so the gallery has its own soundtrack of intermittent knocking.
Add Colour (Refugee Boat)
A white boat and wall that visitors fill with blue and white marker, turning blank space into messages.
Helmets (Pieces of Sky)
Visitors take a puzzle piece away from the installation, to imagine rebuilding the world.
Wish Tree for Los Angeles
Write a peace wish and tie it to an olive tree on East West Bank Plaza.
Grapefruit typescripts (1964)
Rare typescript drafts of Ono's instruction pieces, short poetic texts that direct you to act or contemplate.
Good for
- Evening Visits
- Out-Of-Town Guests
- Teenagers
With kids
Most works are hands-on: kids can hammer nails, draw with markers and take home a puzzle piece.
Also at The Broad
On now nearby
Nearby
Image credits
6
- The BroadLeviclancy / Wikimedia Commons, CC0
- Alexander Apóstol: Regime: Dramatis PersonaeCourtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Photo by Jeff McLane.
- In These Times: Recent Acquisitions at MOCACourtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA)
- Seasons in Cosmos: Works by Diana Shuiu WongCourtesy of Chinese American Museum
- The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA)Benoît Prieur / Wikimedia Commons, CC0
- Chinese American MuseumVisitor7 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0