On July 20, 1964, Yoko Ono walked onto a stage at Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, placed a pair of metal scissors on the floor in front of her folded knees, and gave the audience one instruction: come forward and cut away pieces of my clothing until there is nothing left. She sat motionless while strangers approached one by one, steel blades slicing through her fabric millimeters from her skin. Sixty years later, that single action remains one of the most electric moments in contemporary visual culture.
Right now, Los Angeles is experiencing that tension all over again. The Broad museum on Grand Avenue is hosting Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, a sweeping retrospective running from May 23 through October 11, 2026. Organized alongside Tate Modern in London, the exhibition brings over seven decades of Ono's instruction scores, peace campaigns, and participatory installations to Southern California for her first solo museum presentation in the region. But what anchors the entire third-floor experience is how the show treats the legacy of Cut Piece.
The 1965 Carnegie Hall Film and the Power of the Record
Most visitors at The Broad encounter Cut Piece through a monumental black-and-white film projection in the gallery. The footage captures Ono performing the work at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York in 1965. Shot by legendary documentary filmmakers David and Albert Maysles, the 16mm film runs just over eight and a half minutes, yet every second crackles with psychological weight.
You watch Ono's face remain serene and unblinking as audience members climb the stage steps. Some cut timid, half-inch fragments from her sleeve. Others grab thick folds of her blouse and shear right through the collar. The work strips away the traditional protection that artists enjoy behind a easel or inside a studio. Instead, Ono handed total authority over to the crowd. She turned vulnerability into her medium, making the audience complicity visible under bright stage lights.
And that is why the Carnegie Hall footage endures. Performance art is ephemeral by nature, but high-contrast art photography prints and 16mm film captures preserve the exact social friction of the room. When you look at MoMA's archival records of Cut Piece from that era, you aren't just looking at documentation of an old event. You are watching a radical Fluxus idea survive across decades: the understanding that art does not live on a canvas, but inside human behavior.
Why MPA Is Picking Up the Scissors at REDCAT
Curators Sarah Loyer at The Broad and Juliet Bingham at Tate Modern understood something important when putting this retrospective together. Watching the Maysles brothers' 1965 film projection is mesmerizing, but a screen inevitably acts as a protective shield. It keeps the viewer a safe step removed from the physical risk of the performance.
To bridge that gap, The Broad teamed up with REDCAT theater to invite Los Angeles-based performance artist MPA to enact Cut Piece live alongside Ono's 1966 work Sky Piece to Jesus Christ. As reported in The Guardian's recent coverage of the restaging, MPA stepped into the work with a mixture of pride and trepidation. She wasn't fearful of the physical scissors, but rather weighed how six decades of cultural shifts would change the energy in the room. When a contemporary audience approaches a sitting artist with sharp blades in 2026, the silence feels different, but the core question remains identical: how do we treat one another when given unchecked permission?
Beyond the Scissors: An Exhibition Built on Invitation
While Cut Piece confronts the harder truths of human agency, the broader exhibition shows how generously Ono invites visitors to build something better together. Across the galleries, you'll find typescript drafts of her 1964 book Grapefruit containing over 200 instruction poems, which stand as foundational works of minimalism art and conceptual thinking, including pieces like "Listen to the sound of the Earth turning" and "Draw a map to get lost." You can pick up a real hammer and join strangers in adding nails to Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961/1966), or step outside to the East West Bank Plaza and tie your handwritten hopes to olive tree branches for Wish Trees for Los Angeles.
It is a rare museum show where you leave behind more than you took in. Whether through the uncompromising stillness of Cut Piece or the gentle rustle of thousands of paper tags on an olive tree, Ono's message is unmistakable. The artwork is not the physical object sitting in the gallery. The artwork is what happens inside your own mind when you decide to take part.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Fluxus movement and how does Cut Piece fit into it?
Fluxus was a global radical art network founded in the 1960s that prioritized conceptual ideas, performance, and everyday life over finished luxury objects. Cut Piece is a defining Fluxus landmark because it relies entirely on a written instruction and voluntary audience participation rather than traditional sculpting or painting skills.
Can visitors at The Broad participate in Cut Piece directly?
No. Museum visitors view the historical 16mm film projection of Yoko Ono's 1965 Carnegie Recital Hall performance. Live participatory restagings are handled exclusively by commissioned artists like MPA during scheduled theater events at REDCAT.
If you're inspired by the power of high-contrast documentation and conceptual imagery from this era, exploring fine art photography and black art prints can bring that same graphic clarity into your home.
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