I Am Yoko
What if you could become Yoko Ono for one night?
Join us for a first-look workshop of I Am Yoko, a multimedia musical currently in development, written, designed, and directed by musician Yuka Honda and LA artist Glenn Kaino, and performed by Honda and Kaino with vocalists Theo Bleckmann, and Yoko Ono’s granddaughter Emi Helfrich, and cellist Maggie Parkins.
Intent on humanizing Yoko Ono, an artist whose life has been scrutinized far more than it has been understood, this work-in-progress presentation will broaden our understanding of Ono’s personal and family life, her thoughts, passions, and philosophies. Through music, song, and projected images, the audience becomes Yoko Ono, as we rediscover and shed light on a cultural icon whose...
What if you could become Yoko Ono for one night?
Join us for a first-look workshop of I Am Yoko, a multimedia musical currently in development, written, designed, and directed by musician Yuka Honda and LA artist Glenn Kaino, and performed by Honda and Kaino with vocalists Theo Bleckmann, and Yoko Ono’s granddaughter Emi Helfrich, and cellist Maggie Parkins.
Intent on humanizing Yoko Ono, an artist whose life has been scrutinized far more than it has been understood, this work-in-progress presentation will broaden our understanding of Ono’s personal and family life, her thoughts, passions, and philosophies. Through music, song, and projected images, the audience becomes Yoko Ono, as we rediscover and shed light on a cultural icon whose career and life path defies expectations and surface-level categorizations. Presented in conjunction with the special exhibition, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind.
Know Before You Go
Please note: Yoko Ono will not be a part of or in attendance of this program.
Tickets include one-time admission to Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, The Broad’s third-floor rotating collection galleries, and The Shop at The Broad during regular museum operating hoursfrom September 12 through September 26. Present your ticket to this event at the main entrance of the museum for admission.
Tickets do not include access to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), which must be booked separately.
Bios
Yuka Honda
Yuka Honda (eucademix) is a composer, producer, and sonic innovator whose work defies genre and convention. Co-founder of the trailblazing duo Cibo Matto, she has since forged a solo path that blends electronic experimentation, improvisational depth, infectious rhythm, and abstract storytelling. She describes her music as quantum, continuum, and sensory—a fluid exploration of sound as both narrative and experience. Like a book or a film, her compositions invite the listener into a story: shifting through contrasting emotions, spaces, and textures to create an unfolding journey. Her work was shaped by the sound of hip hop—where sampling, layering, and cross-genre collage redefined music—as well as by experimental production, microtonal detail, and the interplay between digital and live instrumentation. Honda has collaborated with artists including Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Nels Cline, Photay, Jason Lindner (Black Star), Dave Harrington (Darkside), L’Rain, and Martha Wainwright, and her recent projects span multimedia opera, museum performance, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Highlights include Respira, a duo with Butoh dancer Azumi O E at ISSUE Project Room, and her score for Karon Davis’s “Resurrection of Osiris” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Living in upstate New York, Honda draws inspiration from radical farming movements and her deep engagement with community, merging art, ecology, and philosophy into a singular sonic vision. Yuka Honda is a board member of the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to food sovereignty and regenerative agriculture. Her works Farm Psychedelia I and Farm Psychedelia II honor the radical farmers of upstate New York who are innovating solutions to food insecurity, further bridging her artistic practice with her commitment to community and environmental stewardship.
Photo by Sean Ono Lennon
Glenn Kaino
Glenn Kaino was born in 1972 in Los Angeles. Kaino’s works, often functioning as poetic contradictions, aim to reconcile conflicting ideologies, opposing systems, and strict dichotomies in material and experiential ways.
Conceiving his practice as conceptual kitbashing, akin to a model maker’s way of appropriating readymade kits to assemble unique models, Kaino reconfigures the conditions of distinct cultural spheres into ecologies of making in which seemingly disparate materials and ideas are brought into contact.
His studio practice includes sculpture, painting, filmmaking, performance, installation, and large-scale public work. He also operates outside the traditional purview of contemporary art, instigating collaborations with other modes of culture—ranging from tech to music to political organizing.
Major solo exhibitions of Kaino’s work have been presented at the High Museum of Art; the San Jose Museum of Art; Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Andy Warhol Museum; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Artpace San Antonio, and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Kaino’s work has been featured in Desert X, the 13th International Cairo Biennale, the 12th Biennale de Lyon, Performa (2009), the 2004 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and Prospect.3, New Orleans. Kaino’s work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Kaino is also an Emmy and Webby Award-winning producer and documentarian, whose films have been featured at the Tribeca Film Festival and SXSW.
Photo by Nogen Beck
Theo Bleckmann
Theo Bleckmann is a Grammy nominated singer and new music composer whose approach blurs boundaries and surprises expectations. Bleckmann re-imagines songs by Henry Purcell, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Kurt Weil, Kate Bush, Massive Attack and the Bee Gees. He’s appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, is the recipient of the Jazz Echo award, and has toured Europe with Oulu Symphony Orchestra and UMO Jazz Big Band and Japan with Century Symphony Orchestra. Bleckmann is also recognized for his original work and has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, John Hollenbeck, Ulysses Owens, John Zorn, Bang on a Can All-Stars, and more.
Photo by Raoul Manuel Schnell
Emi Helfrich
Emi Helfrich is a New York based multimedia artist whose work is rooted in international cultural identity and radical hope. She is excited to celebrate the legacy of Yoko Ono, an artist who has deeply influenced her as both an activist and an artist. Emi believes that hope is not in opposition to grief; they are part of the same truth. Even after the bombing of Hiroshima, flowers were growing in the rubble only a year later. These cycles of loss and rebirth are at the core of her creative vision. From 2019 to 2020, she lived in Tokyo, seeking to strengthen her connection with her Japanese family. Her experience continues to inform her work, which channels the fantastical to examine resilience and the transformative power of love.
Photo by sophie lair-berreby