MUSAC—Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León—presents a wide-ranging survey of Yoko Ono’s practice, assembling more than seventy works across approximately 1,700 square meters to trace a career that moves fluently between performance, conceptual and participatory art, film, sound, installation, painting, and photography. The exhibition’s title, “Yoko Ono. Insound and Instructure,” echoes an early moment in the artist’s trajectory and signals the show’s central premise: the fusion of sound with the instruction-based form that has long underpinned her approach. Here, the primacy of the idea—art articulated as a set of proposals, scores, or invitations—takes precedence over material form.
Curated by Jon Hendricks, Connor Monahan, and Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, the presentation is described as Ono’s most extensive showing in Spain in recent years. The curators chart a path from the artist’s formative period to her mature work, placing canonical pieces alongside participatory environments and later installations. Throughout, the visitor is treated not only to a survey of media but also to a throughline that anchors Ono’s oeuvre: the active role of the audience in realizing or completing the work.
The exhibition’s selection highlights several early landmarks that shaped the language of performance and conceptual art. “Cut Piece” is staged in dialogue with other instruction-based works that make the viewer a co-author, including “Voice Piece for Soprano” and “Draw Circle Painting,” the latter requiring public participation to exist in full. The show also features participatory environments such as “A MAZE,” a navigable labyrinth, and “EN TRANCE,” an architectural threshold conceived as both prologue and proposition. Moving through these works, the visitor experiences how Ono’s instructions unfold into embodied situations—acts of walking, listening, speaking, or choosing—through which art becomes a practice of attention and agency rather than an object to behold.
MUSAC does not limit its scope to celebrated historical pieces. Recent projects are included to show the continuity of themes that resonate across decades. “DOORS” and “INVISIBLE FLAGS” extend Ono’s long engagement with peace, social imagination, and the reframing of familiar structures and symbols. As with her earlier work, these installations deploy concise prompts and stark gestures, asking viewers to consider how shifts in perception might open space for collective reflection.
Film—a core strand of Ono’s practice—appears here in a focused constellation. Selected titles made independently and in collaboration with John Lennon, among them “Rape,” “Fly,” and “Freedom,” foreground questions that run through her wider output: intimacy and exposure; the politics of looking and being looked at; the elasticity of perception over time. Presented alongside instruction pieces and participatory environments, these films clarify the cross-media coherence of Ono’s method. Whether on the page, in a gallery, or on screen, the work often begins as language, a brief directive or score that sets conditions for an event. The resulting form is less a finished product than an activated situation.
The MUSAC presentation lands amid a broader institutional reassessment of Ono’s legacy. Major museums have recently dedicated large-scale exhibitions to her work, an indication of its continued relevance to contemporary debates about participation, authorship, activism, and the social role of art. Within this context, the León survey functions as both an introduction for new audiences and an in-depth encounter for those familiar with key pieces, situating Ono not at the margins of postwar practice but at its conceptual and performative core.
A concise biographical frame helps situate the evolution of the instruction-based method that animates the show. Born in Tokyo, Ono spent formative periods in the United States before settling in New York. She was the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushuin University and later studied at Sarah Lawrence College. Immersed in overlapping communities of artists and composers, she developed a practice that privileged ideas and scores over conventional objects, inviting the spectator to enact the work.
In Lower Manhattan, Ono rented a loft where, together with composer La Monte Young, she organized performances and events central to the city’s emergent experimental scene. Her first solo exhibition, at AG Gallery, presented “Instruction Paintings,” including the now-emblematic “Painting to Be Stepped On,” and she performed at Carnegie Recital Hall with works that combined movement, sound, and voice. A return to Tokyo brought new performances at the Sogetsu Art Center and a pivotal consolidation of the instruction format—works consisting solely of written prompts that replaced the material object with the idea itself. During this period she also toured with John Cage and David Tudor, further entwining her art with experimental music. The self-published book Grapefruit would distill the spirit of this approach into a compact volume of scores.
Back in New York, Ono continued to stage events, pursue mail-based and advertising interventions, and write instruction-driven film scripts while directing her own short films. Invitations to London placed her within the circle of artists around the Destruction in Art Symposium and brought exhibitions at Indica and Lisson galleries. Conceptual object-works such as White Chess Set, Apple, and Half-A-Room appeared alongside a new version of Film No. 4 (Bottoms) and a sequence of performances under the rubric “Music of the Mind.” At Indica Gallery she met John Lennon, initiating a creative partnership that would span art, film, and music as well as public, media-savvy forms of activism.
With Lennon, Ono’s conceptual strategies expanded into widely visible peace initiatives, including the “WAR IS OVER! If you want it” campaign and the Bed-Ins for Peace. These actions extended the logic of the instruction into the civic sphere: a call to imagine and enact different social relations. Over the following years, Ono released multiple solo and collaborative albums and created several films—including FLY, Freedom, Rape, Apotheosis, and Imagine—while also organizing museum-based experiments that challenged the boundaries between official institutions and conceptual gesture. The artist would later describe music as a sustaining force during a period marked by personal upheaval.
Institutional recognition of Ono’s visual work grew appreciably thereafter. A solo presentation at the Whitney Museum signaled renewed attention, followed by the multi-venue retrospective Yes Yoko Ono, organized by Japan Society Gallery and traveling to numerous international sites. In Iceland, the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER established a permanent monument to the couple’s shared commitment to peace. Further recognition included a major lifetime achievement honor at the Venice Biennale and subsequent albums that revisited and reinterpreted material from throughout her career. Large-scale exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Tate Modern in London, and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin underscore the continued relevance of her work to contemporary discourse.
Within MUSAC’s galleries, the curatorial sequence draws a precise line between the intimate scale of an instruction and the architectural scale of an environment. The entry passage of “EN TRANCE” acts as a hinge: an overture that compresses the exhibition’s concerns—thresholds, transformation, play—into a spatial experience. “A MAZE” likewise translates the logic of a short text score into bodily movement, asking visitors to navigate rather than simply observe. In this sense, the show doubles as a primer on how Ono’s ideas traverse formats: a single instruction may produce a spoken performance, a filmed action, a room-scale installation, or a quiet proposition printed on paper and left to activate the reader’s imagination.
The throughline is not simply formal. Ono’s insistence that art can be a vehicle for social imagination undergirds the range of works on view. “DOORS” reframes an everyday object as a passage between states—private and public, closed and open—while “INVISIBLE FLAGS” strips a potent political symbol to its bare idea, inviting reflection on allegiance, nationhood, and responsibility. These works do not instruct an audience in what to think; rather, they ask viewers to consider how small shifts in perception, repeated at scale, can alter the fabric of shared life. The achievement of the MUSAC presentation is to keep that ambition legible across time and medium without recourse to spectacle: an expansive argument assembled from spare means.
As a whole, “Yoko Ono. Insound and Instructure” presents a practice that moved early toward dematerialization and never left the social stakes of that move behind. By staging instructions, scores, and proposals across film, sound, and environment, the exhibition demonstrates how an artwork can remain open—conceptually, politically, and formally—while still possessing a clear structure. It also affirms the audience’s role as collaborator, extending authorship outward. That proposition, central to Ono’s art, is the exhibition’s most sustained argument: art as a catalyst for imagining and enacting change, beginning with the simple act of paying attention to an instruction and deciding what to do next.
Venue and dates: MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León — exhibition on view from November 8 until May 17, 2026. Curated by Jon Hendricks, Connor Monahan, and Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya.
