Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” returns to Los Angeles at The Broad as retrospective marks 60 years

More than six decades after Yoko Ono first staged “Cut Piece,” the work is being brought back to public view in Los Angeles through a traveling retrospective at The Broad museum. The exhibit, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, features projected black-and-white video footage of Ono’s 1964 performance at Carnegie Hall, an event that helped establish “Cut Piece” as a landmark in performance art history.

The restaging of the presentation in Los Angeles comes as museums continue to grapple with how to present performance works that rely on audience participation and that have different social and ethical meanings across time. In the Carnegie Hall performance, Ono sat in front of the audience at age 31 while participants were invited to cut pieces from her clothing, a setup that has since been discussed for its tension between art, consent, and potential harm.

According to The Broad’s framing as reported by The Guardian, the Los Angeles installation uses documentation rather than a live recreation of the original 1964 format. Black-and-white footage from the earlier performance is projected onto one of the museum walls as part of the retrospective, effectively transporting viewers back to a moment widely cited as foundational to contemporary performance art.

The exhibit at The Broad is presented as a component of a broader traveling survey of Ono’s career and artistic themes. The Guardian described the retrospective as a way to reconnect viewers with early works and to locate them within the larger arc of Ono’s output, including her long-standing engagement with audience attention and interpretive uncertainty.

“Cut Piece” is widely associated with the broader history of 1960s avant-garde practice, when artists tested the boundaries of what could count as art and who could be treated as part of the artwork. For Ono, the work’s structure has often been read as shifting the focus from the artist’s body to the behavior and decision-making of participants, with the museum setting now adding a different layer of institutional context.

At the same time, museums and cultural institutions have increasingly faced heightened scrutiny around public-facing performances that involve physical risk, coercion concerns, or ambiguous consent. In the case of Ono’s work as shown in this retrospective, the choice to present the Carnegie Hall footage through projection rather than re-running the participation element places the emphasis on historical record and reception rather than repeating the event exactly as it originally occurred.

The Broad’s presentation is scheduled as part of the ongoing run of Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind in Los Angeles. For visitors, the experience offers a way to encounter the piece in a contemporary museum environment while also revisiting what made the original performance notable, and what viewers in 2026 may interpret differently from audiences in 1964.

As “Cut Piece” continues to be re-examined through exhibition programming and archival footage, the Los Angeles restaging underscores the continuing role of museums in translating performance art into formats accessible to the public. The museum context, the use of documented material, and the work’s enduring reputation all shape how new audiences encounter one of performance art’s most durable touchstones.