Yoko Ono, “Music of the Mind”

by Margaret Hawkins

MCA Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Continuing through February 22, 2026

Clay Perry, “Yoko Ono with Half-a-Room,” 1967. All images courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”

— Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono is one of those artists whose persona overshadows her artwork, which never quite reemerged publicly in the U.S. after the 1980 murder of her husband, John Lennon. But all along she has been making new work. “Music of the World” is a comprehensive show highlighting seven decades of creative productivity. Ono, now 92, was a serious and widely recognized artist before she ever met Lennon, and continued to be one after he died.

“Yoko Ono's Secret Piece,” 1953, from typescripts for “Grapefruit.” Courtesy of Yoko Ono via Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

The show is roughly chronological and the works are mostly conceptual. Beginning in the 1950s, it foregrounds ideas over objects. The best work combines them. I found myself smiling the whole 90 minutes it took me to traverse the show. I’d forgotten how sweet Ono’s art is, how earnestly instructive.

The earlier pieces capture the mood of the 1960s. Seen at the time as provocative, dangerous even, the work feels rather polite now. Then, most people didn’t like Ono. They thought she was abrasive. She was an outsider in America, with a distinct Japanese accent. She threatened people’s sense of gender appropriateness, as an equal, sometimes dominant partner to her famous, adored husband. She made dissonant recordings that sounded ugly and vaguely sexual, and not in a titillating way. She wasn’t a tall silent Barbie doll with smooth hair. She talked too much. And she broke up The Beatles — or so it was widely believed. (More recently music historians have pointed out that she in fact encouraged Lennon to remain with the group). She was regarded strident, but now her work seems more beseeching than scrreching.

Still from “Bed Peace” interview video. Newly-weds John Lennon and Yoko Ono kick-off a bed-in for peace on Mar. 25, 1969, in their suite at the Hilton Amsterdam in The Netherlands. Keystone/Hulton Archive—Getty Images.

Much of Ono’s work looks remarkably uncontroversial in retrospect, even corny in some cases. She was advocating peace in a time of war, collaboration in a time of polarization. She vaunted the power of imagination to make things better. Some of Ono’s best works are her “Instructions for Paintings,” from her 1964 artist book, “Grapefruit.” Short sentences direct readers to make something, usually in their minds but sometimes in the physical world. “Painting to Shake Hands” tells us to punch a hole in something and thrust an arm through to shake hands with somebody on the other side. What a perfect image. A punctured canvas was set up in the gallery and, when I was there, two noisy fourth-graders on a field trip obliged.

Yoko Ono, “Add Colour (Refugee Boat),” 1960/2016. © Yoko Ono. Courtesy of the Tate Modern, London. Photo: Margaret Hawkins.

I was struck by how understandable Ono’s work is. Unlike much conceptual art that followed during the early 60s, Ono’s work doesn’t offer — or require — wordy explanations. “The Blue Room Event” (1960) consists of an empty white room with handwritten instructions posted at eye-level telling viewers to imagine that the room is blue, tat it glows in the dark while they sleep, that “This is not here.”

And of course some of the work is funny. The “Bed Peace” (1969) video shows Yoko and John being interviewed in bed by a stodgy journalist who declines their invitation to climb in with them. Clearly embarrassed, he congratulates them on proving to the world that they have pubic hair. John and Yoko are kind to the guy, but I felt sorry for him, dressed as he was in his suit. This is a time capsule, totally of the 60s, pitting the cool kids against the (stuffy old white) man.

Yoko Ono, “Cut Piece,” 1964, photograph of performance at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, NY, March 21, 1965. © Yoko Ono. Photo by Minoru Niizuma.

Much of the work is participatory. The last gallery, which is the most visually stunning, features “Add Colour (Refugee Boat)” (2016). In this piece an empty boat sits in an empty, formerly white room. Viewers are invited to write their hopes and beliefs anywhere, with markers in shades of blue. And they have. Scrawled graffiti covers every reachable surface. The idea — empathy, refugees are just like us! — is clear and beautiful.

The most powerful piece in the show, a 1964 video of one of the first performances of “Cut Piece,” is still edgy 60 years later. Ono sits motionless the spotlit onstage as audience members approach and snip off pieces of her clothing. One by one they remove chunks of fabric. Then a young man climbs onstage and begins to cut her slip. The scissors pass close to her skin. He continues, moves to her other side and cuts more, removing her slip, exposing her bra. This seems like more than his share of cutting but after a pause he leans in again, snips her bra straps. The bra falls; she raises her arms and clutches her breasts.

Yoko Ono, “Wish Tree for Stockholm,” 1996/2012, installation view. Courtesy of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2012. © Yoko Ono. Photo: Moderna Museet/Åsa Lund.

Though Ono has invited this, it feels like assault. We watch her face; surely that is a flicker of fear we see in her eyes, the twitch in her jaw a flash of anger. Ono has said that the piece is about giving and taking. But mostly it feels like taking, a pointedly feminist statement on being used, exploring the blurry lines between vulnerability, passivity, and complicity. The piece invites the audience to do as they please, and the young man does, illustrating a fact of life for women that couldn’t have been better performed if it had been scripted.

Ono’s work is all about vulnerability. She tells us to wish for things, imagine them, create change through belief. But “Cut Piece” enacts the other side of that virtue.

This show won’t feel groundbreaking to anyone who has walked into an art museum in the past 50 years. Conceptual art has moved on, and at times Ono’s work is pointedly naïve. But I loved the defiant innocence of this show, its idealism, its humor, its accessibility, its sweetness and, in the case of “Cut Piece,” a little taste of bitterness.

Margaret Hawkins is a writer, critic and educator. Her books include “Lydia’s Party” (2015), “How We Got Barb Back” (2011) a memoir about family mental illness, and others. She wrote a column about art for the Chicago Sun-Times, was Chicago correspondent for ARTnews, and has written for a number of other publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Art & Antiques and Fabrik. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University.

Visit Margaret Hawkins’ website.