Yoko Ono art exhibit makes its only stop at Chicago’s MCA

Outside Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, there’s now a giant black-and-white billboard that reads, “PEACE is POWER” in a simple sans-serif type.

Those words, courtesy of Yoko Ono, feel eerily poignant in a moment of political turmoil in Chicago and across the country, admits curator Jamillah James.

“The first time I actually saw it installed, it took my breath away,” James said on a recent weekday morning at the museum. “It’s just such a powerful sentiment that’s pretty straightforward. It’s three words, but those words have a lot of impact.”

Inside, the downtown museum is putting the finishing touches on the giant Ono retrospective, “Music of the Mind,” which opens Saturday and will be on view until February. After opening at London’s Tate Modern and stopping in Germany, Chicago is currently set to be the show’s only U.S. stop.

The exhibit features more than 200 items that showcase the breadth of Ono’s prolific artistic output and activism over seven decades, including her avant-garde films, original music and participatory pieces. Together, it all challenges a once-popular cultural perception of Ono that limits her to her association with her late husband, John Lennon, and blames her for the Beatles’ breakup.

“I think this has been a gradual shift over the years, people that are becoming more and more aware that she had an entire career before the more public parts of her life,” James said. “So I think while the public might have one perception of Yoko from her public image, there’s so many aspects of her career that really come to bear in this exhibition.”

Ono’s art greets MCA visitors before they even reach the fourth-floor galleries. In the lobby, visitors can make their own additions to Ono’s “Wish Trees,” which invites people to express their hopes for peace. Then, the elevators fill with the sound of either a toilet flushing or a person coughing — samples of Ono audio works.

As James puts it, it’s pretty much “Ono-palooza” at MCA right now.

The sprawling display highlights Ono’s role as a pioneer in conceptual art. She’s also been associated with Fluxus, the international artist movement that emerged in the 1960s and rejected traditional norms, opting instead to see art as an extension of everyday life.

Some of Ono’s most famous works feature prominently, including “Half-A-Room” from 1967. It includes items like a chair, night table and suitcase that appear to have been sawed down the middle.

Visitors can also view a video of one of Ono’s notable 1960s performance works, “Cut Piece.” It shows Ono, then in her 30s, sitting still on a stage as audience members approach her, pick up a pair of scissors and “systematically cut away pieces of her clothing until she was slightly exposed,” said James. In more recent years, the curator adds, this work has been reinterpreted through a feminist lens.

In each room, Ono — who is now 92 and not expected to travel to Chicago for the show— serves up something slightly unexpected, like a bright green apple, simply labeled “apple,” perched atop a plexiglass pedestal. The fruit, James said, will be changed out throughout the run.

The show offers many ways for audiences to participate, which has always been a key part of Ono’s art. In one spot, with a view of Lake Michigan, guests are invited to reassemble smashed porcelain cups and saucers with tape, twine and glue.

Viewers are also welcome to hammer a nail into a blank canvas, grab a blue puzzle piece out of helmets suspended from the ceiling and try their hand at an all-white chess board. So long as — as the label states — “you can remember where all your pieces are.”

“People really love to go to museums and touch things, whether or not they should, but this will be one that you can actually touch things and do things in the galleries,” James said, adding that the show is great for visitors of all ages.

James did not initially curate the touring exhibition, but she puts her own touch on the Chicago run by infusing it with even more interactive experiences. Each day, local university students will stage performance art in the galleries tied to Ono’s book “Grapefruit.”

James heads into a space with a simple rowboat in the center. Right now, ahead of the exhibition’s official opening, the room is stark white. But, over the course of the show, this work — entitled “Add Colour (Refugee Boat)” — will become a communal art piece. Visitors are encouraged to draw and write on the boat, walls and floor using the provided bright blue markers.

The piece, which James said is a commentary on the “plight of immigrants right now,” underscores the longstanding activism that powers much of Ono’s work. That activism is also evident in the video of “Bed-in,” during which Ono and Lennon staged a nonviolent protest against the Vietnam War by spending eight days in a Montreal hotel bed. The couple invited press and famous friends to stop in throughout their stay.

“It’s part of the beauty and the subtlety of Yoko’s work … just to give pause and think about these ideas of peace,” James said. “Peace is an abstraction, I think, to a lot of people, but in today’s world, it’s something that is very, very direly needed.”

Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.