"Yoko Ono: Dream together at Neue Nationalgalerie is an exhibition featuring works from across Ono’s groundbreaking career. The exhibition invites viewers to move beyond passive observation and engage in active participation – both physically and mentally. Often beginning on an individual level, these actions evolve into broader collective efforts, demonstrating the transformative power of communal actions in working toward peace and imagining a different world."

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is thrilled to announce Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, opening October 2025. The MCA is the exclusive US venue for this comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to artist, musician, and activist Yoko Ono (b. 1933, Tokyo, Japan; lives in New York). Traveling from Tate Modern in London, where it enjoyed record attendance, and in close collaboration with Ono’s studio, this groundbreaking retrospective covers seventy years of Ono’s trailblazing career, with over 200 works including participatory instruction pieces and scores, installations, a curated music room, films, music and photography, and archival materials. The exhibition reveals Ono’s innovative approach to language, art, and participation that continues to speak to the present moment.

With three exhibitions running simultaneously this summer, the Japanese artist hovers over Berlin like a vast alien spacecraft, zapping us with cringeworthy one-liners, showering us with torrents of platitudes about peace and love. In a rare triple play, her Gropius Bau summer blockbuster coincides with the Neue Nationalgalerie’s exhibition and she’s even taken over the enormous Neue Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) billboard.

The past decade or so has brought a great reassessment of Ono. Beatles fans who stupidly blamed her for the band’s breakup have either piped down or realized the true root of the split: money, credit and basic human dynamics. Ono detractors, who mocked her wailing vocal performances, have perhaps realized that her work was not meant to play alongside the latest Doobie Brothers single. A list of respected popular artists — David Byrne, Lady Gaga, St. Vincent — have spoken of her influence.

Are we living through a Yokossance ?
Though the 92-year-old conceptual artist, musician and Beatle widow Yoko Ono has spent much of the past decade far from the public eye dealing with health issues, each year seems to bring a new opportunity to reassess her contributions to culture. In the 2020s alone, there has been a tribute album, a small shelf’s worth of biographies and, just last year, a blockbuster, career-spanning show of her artwork at London’s Tate Modern.

The critically acclaimed Yoko Ono retrospective that generated large crowds at Tate Modern last year will open in October at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, its only presentation in the US. The show, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, spans 70 years of Ono’s career from her early Fluxus pieces and conceptual works to more recent participatory installations, bringing together more than 200 objects.

The exhibition is featuring works from across Ono’s groundbreaking career. The show will be presented on the occasion of her touring retrospective exhibition YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND, on display at Berlin’s Gropius Bau from 11 April to 31 August 2025. At the same time, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) will be presenting the work TOUCH by Yoko Ono in their billboard series. The exhibition invites viewers to move beyond passive observation and engage in active participation – both physically and mentally. Often beginning on an individual level, these actions evolve into broader collective efforts, demonstrating the transformative power of communal actions in working toward peace and imagining a different world. The works invite collective actions of repair, healing, cleaning, mending, wishing, imagining, and dreaming.

With the opening of a blockbuster exhibition at London's Tate Modern last year, let's take this opportunity to celebrate Yoko Ono and explore why she never received a fair trial. (...) An exhibition hoping to celebrate Ono as an experimental, enduring and visionary artist in her own right.

Yoko Ono stands out as a key figure in contemporary art, celebrated for her innovative and thought-provoking works that defy traditional artistic norms. Born in Japan and later relocating to the United States, Ono’s journey as a Japanese-American woman has profoundly influenced her art. Moreover her work transcends conventional boundaries, tackling social issues and inspiring contemporary artists to delve into the realms of transnationalism, social consciousness, and artistic originality.

Today in Affaires Sensibles, Yoko Ono, Oh yes, or the romantic journey of a mysterious artist, and a 1.57 m tall misunderstanding, who has hovered over popular culture for almost 60 years. Yoko Ono is first and foremost the black widow through whom the scandal arrived; the one who, by dint of manipulations and satanic acts, destroyed the Beatles from the inside [...] Of course, all this is false, but it's the little tune we've been hearing regularly since the group's official split in April 1970. So who built this reputation? One thing is certain: before being the wife of a genius, Yoko Ono is first and foremost a unique artist whose aura extends far beyond music. A survivor of the Second World War, who arrived in New York from Japan at the age of 19 and was close to the Fluxus art movement, Yoko Ono had a thousand lives before embracing that of the Liverpool 4. Clever and calculating as well as warm and optimistic, she remains a mystery to this day. But who's behind that round face, impassive gaze and inimitable voice?

By entering the show, one steps through Yoko Ono's gaze into a memory bank that includes seven-decades of her work [...] This reiterates Ono's premise : that the real aesthetic accomplishment exists primarily in one's own mind, or the mind of the viewer, even if that realization is catalyzed by material iterations-like a film, photograph, or performance.

Yoko Ono is making a return to Baltic; not in person, as in 2008 when her work was the subject of a major exhibition at the Gateshead centre for contemporary art, but as an artistic presence. Her IMAGINE PEACE artwork, exhibited as part of that show, is being displayed again as a banner on the outside of the building to mark International Day of Peace on Saturday, September 21. With so much conflict dominating headlines, it can do no harm – whatever cynics might say - to pay heed to Yoko’s plea to “think peace, spread peace and act peace”. Baltic is marking the day with activities aimed at encouraging reflection on peace and unity. Visitors will be invited to add messages to a trio of Yoko-inspired Peace Trees and participate in creative writing workshops.