The Broad’s new Yoko Ono exhibit features pro-peace billboard campaign

Yoko Ono is bringing her message of peace to Los Angeles as part of her upcoming exhibition at the Broad museum.

Nearly 57 years after she and her husband John Lennon erected a billboard near the Chateau Marmont emblazoned with the words, “WAR IS OVER! If You Want It,” the 93-year-old artist will place a series of seven digital billboards across the city, with five along Sunset Strip in West Hollywood and one each at the TCL Chinese Theatre and Fox Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.

The billboards, which read, “THINK PEACE,” “ACT PEACE,” “SPREAD PEACE,” “IMAGINE PEACE,” and “PEACE is POWER,” are part of a host of ancillary programming announced Thursday by the museum in conjunction with the new show, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” opening May 23.

Also on the schedule: the re-creation of two of Ono’s groundbreaking performance art works, including 1964’s iconic “Cut Piece,” which Ono originally performed in Kyoto and Tokyo, before staging its American debut at Carnegie Hall. During that show, Ono sat silently onstage while members of the audience slowly snipped away pieces of her clothes. “Cut Piece” will be revived this summer by performance and visual artist MPA at REDCAT. In another performance, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will endeavor to capture the essence of “Sky Piece to Jesus Christ” (1965), which saw Ono wrap an ensemble in gauze until they could no longer play their instruments.

“Cut Piece,” 1964, performed in ‘New Works of Yoko Ono,’ Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, filmed by David and Albert Maysles, film, 16mm, black and white, and sound (stereo), 8min, 27sec.

(© Yoko Ono)

In August, the museum’s summer concert series will return, highlighted by “Yoko Only”; a night celebrating Ono’s extensive music catalog. The event will be guest-curated by Yuka Honda, who co-founded the Japanese American band Cibo Matto with Miho Hatori. At the top of the bill are Yo La Tengo and Nels Cline, guitarist for Wilco and Honda’s husband. Other musicians include Ono’s granddaughter, Emi Helfrich, Theo Bleckmann, Finom, Maggie Parkins, Patrick Shiroishi, Sleater-Kinney, Sylvan Esso, Tune-Yards and Rufus Wainwright.

“Since the ’60s, [Ono] has engaged mass media as a platform for her work, and used the language of advertising in her work to spread her message,” says Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager at the Broad.

Loyer has a history of curating work featuring politically driven narratives. She previously spearheaded three celebrated exhibitions, “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” in 2023, “This Is Not America’s Flag” one year prior, and 2019’s “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983.” The latter, similar to the Ono exhibition, arrived after showing at Tate Modern in London.

“Ono’s work… often takes on a political position,” Loyer explains. “It’s almost always a humanitarian message. It’s a huge piece of her work — an emphasis that she’s had for her whole career.”

The original 1969 “WAR IS OVER! If You Want It” L.A. billboard, which also appeared in Times Square and was printed in the New York Times, was not well documented, Loyer notes.

A billboard promoting peace designed by Yoko Ono and John Lennon towers over Sunset Blvd. in 1969.

(Photograph David Schoonover / Artwork Yoko Ono / Lennon)

”But we found the photographer and got the rights to it, and we’re blowing it up; it’ll be a huge graphic in the galleries,” she says. The additional billboard phrases echo those coined during Ono and Lennon’s creation of the conceptual country of “Nutopia,” which championed peace, love and unity.

That campaign ran in protest of the Vietnam War, but Ono continued to push its core message. And although the current exhibition’s presentation may be timely, it was in development long before today’s ongoing conflicts. “The marker of a great artist’s work is that it continues to feel relevant,” Loyer says.

Ono’s practice rests on giving agency to the audience, Loyer notes. “It’s really about placing trust in all of us to effect change in the world.”

Yoko Ono at one of her early exhibitions.

(Mirrorpix / Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

The exhibition’s guest curator, Honda, first encountered Ono right after she moved to New York City, and before she started her band. While strolling through Central Park in 1987, Honda spotted the artist wandering with no guards and an elderly woman by her side.

“It was so peaceful; it was a different Yoko than I knew from the media,” she recalled. “She had this really warm air, and I waved to her, and she waved back to me. I felt very excited, like I witnessed something magical, and it stayed with me for a long time, but I didn’t know that I would end up meeting her.”

It wouldn’t be until the mid-’90s that the two crossed paths again, when Cibo Matto remixed “Talking to the Universe,” and Ono invited the duo to lunch. During the meal, she asked Honda to rehearse with her and her son, Sean Lennon, before they performed at a concert memorializing the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Backstage, she and Sean “hit it off immediately,” spawning a blossoming creative relationship that has held up since.

Honda has since spent a lot of time with Ono, who exposed her to her personal world of visual art and music. Conversations between the two often brimmed with lessons on life, which Honda carries close to heart.

Yuka Honda is a friend of collaborator of Yoko Ono and the guest curator of Ono’s upcoming exhibit at the Broad.

(Sean Ono Lennon)

“She has told me eye-opening ideas that actually stayed with me forever, ” Honda recalls. “The biggest thing that she taught me is about the difficulty of life, which she has experienced a lot of — her husband was murdered in front of her, and her daughter was kidnapped for a long time.”

“Her life is filled with difficult moments. So, she has come up with this idea to view this difficulty as a blessing… It’s happening to teach you something, because by going through it, you grow, you learn.”

When it came to selecting artists to comprise a quasi-supergroup for “Yoko Only,” Honda turned to close friends and those inspired by Ono.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Honda’s guest curation is “I Am Yoko,” described as an “in-progress multimedia musical” being made in collaboration with L.A.-based artist Glenn Kaino.

Honda says the idea for the musical came about after she observed that the world sometimes perceived Ono as “foreign” and “alien.” Honda wanted to bring her back down to Earth.

“There are so many things that we connect to her, even though she is — at the same time — an extraordinary, totally genius artist, who turned a lot of her hard rock inside of her heart into a beautiful flower, a beautiful cloud, and she admitted them to the world,” Honda explains.

“There was a process that she took in order to do so, and I really wanted to talk about that. I also wanted people to feel her life from inside of her; experience it.”

Tickets for select programs are available now at thebroad.org/events. “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” opens May 23 and runs through Oct. 11.