“It’s an Onopalooza here at the MCA,” says Museum of Contemporary Art senior curator Jamillah James. The museum’s new exhibition, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, opens October 18 and runs through February 22, 2026 — its exclusive U.S. appearance.
Originally organized by museums in London, Berlin, and Düsseldorf, Music of the Mind provides a retrospective of seven decades of creativity. It manages to both give 92-year-old Ono her flowers as an innovative conceptual artist and musician, while also serving as a giant playground for grownups. Folks who know her only as John Lennon’s quirky second wife will be surprised at the depth and breadth of her career, which began in the mid-1950s, long before she met the Beatle.
“The exhibition will really open a lot of eyes, so people will realize how much Yoko Ono has done for the arts,” says Tatsu Aoki, a Chicago-based musician, filmmaker, and School of the Art Institute professor who has collaborated with Ono. “I felt the same way about the David Bowie exhibition the MCA had [in 2014]: People didn’t know that David Bowie was also a designer, a painter — so much besides pop music. I think Music of the Mind will awaken people like that.”
Some highlights from the exhibition:
Chicago has a role in Ono’s work.
The exhibition includes a den where people can relax and listen to Ono’s music, including “Walking on Thin Ice,” her Grammy-nominated 1981 hit inspired by Lake Michigan. Meanwhile, Chicago is home to Ono’s only permanent sculpture in North America: Skylanding, which sits on Jackson Park’s Wooded Island. In advance of its installation in 2016, Ono invited Aoki to record an album of the same name, comprised of jazz-fusion covers of Plastic Ono Band songs. Aoki and musicians from two of his ensembles, The Miyumi Project and Tsukasa Taiko, will perform Skylanding at the MCA December 19, one of several events connected to Music of the Mind.
The art can’t be contained.
Music of the Mind is not just a display of physical art: Soundscapes, music, and film clips waft into the galleries, and viewers might encounter activations of performances spurred by the artist’s instructions. The exhibition itself also spreads out: It fills the entire top floor, and little Ono surprises appear elsewhere too. In a nod to Ono’s penchant for playing with sound, the elevators are home to audio installations, with one playing the sound of a toilet flushing as the doors open.
Interactivity is key.
Lying on the floor as you enter the first gallery, where viewers might not even notice it, is an oddly shaped scrap of canvas, dyed with black ink. A sign next to it reads, “A work to be stepped on.” That sets the tone for a parade of participatory installations. Another gallery holds Painting to Shake Hands, a white canvas about six feet tall with a hole cut into its center; it doesn’t hang on a wall but stands in the middle of the room, beckoning people to touch each other through the artwork. Further on is A Piece of the Sky, a work that ties into Ono’s activism for peace: Dangling from the ceiling are 17 inverted helmets that belonged to German troops in WWII, each containing blue puzzle pieces that depict a segment of sky, some with white clouds. Viewers are encouraged to take a piece home.
The humor is mischievous.
If you need a good chuckle, surely you can find one amid these galleries (or in the aforementioned toilet-flushing elevator). White Chess Set encourages people to sit down and enjoy a game of chess, except the entire board and all the pieces are white. The instructions challenge you to play “for as long as you can remember where all your pieces are.” Elsewhere, Apple features a green apple on a pedestal. Ono originally created it in London in 1966 with a £200 price tag — so the buyer could experience “the excitement of watching the apple decay.” (The MCA has obligingly provided a new Granny Smith apple.)