Subheadline: On the museum’s first floor, the artist’s concise message connects decades of conceptual art and peace activism with the everyday lives of New York’s museumgoers.
NEW YORK — Two simple words can carry a complicated history. At The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Yoko Ono’s IMAGINE PEACE places a familiar call for peace in a public museum setting, inviting visitors to pause, consider the possibility of a more peaceful world, and decide what the message means to them.
On view from September 3, 2026, through spring 2027, the installation occupies MoMA’s first floor. Rather than presenting peace as an abstract theme removed from daily experience, the work brings the idea into a space crossed by visitors as they arrive, meet one another, and move through the museum. Its direct language reflects a defining quality of Ono’s practice: the belief that art can begin with an instruction, a thought, or an invitation rather than a traditional object. (MoMA exhibition page)
A message shaped by decades of activism
For Ono, IMAGINE PEACE is part of a sustained artistic and activist commitment, not an isolated slogan. Across several decades, she has circulated messages about peace through billboards, advertisements, postcards, clothing, and digital platforms. By moving between media and public settings, her work challenges the idea that art must remain confined to galleries or understood only through conventional exhibitions.
One important historical reference is the campaign WAR IS OVER! (if you want it), launched by Ono and John Lennon in 1969 in response to the Vietnam War. The campaign carried an antiwar message into public life, using the language and distribution methods of advertising to reach people beyond established art audiences. The project demonstrated how a concise statement could function simultaneously as an artwork, a public intervention, and a call for reflection.
The current MoMA installation extends that history. Its message is accessible without requiring visitors to know the details of Ono’s career, yet it gains additional meaning when considered alongside her longstanding experiments with language, participation, and social engagement.
MoMA has described Ono’s work as an invitation to think about peace. In her own words, “Imagining is something that we can all do, even when we have different opinions about how to get there.” The statement suggests that imagining a different future can provide common ground without requiring everyone to agree on every question or solution. (MoMA press release)
From conceptual art to everyday experience
Born in Tokyo in 1933, Ono emerged on the international art scene in the early 1960s. Her work spans visual art, performance, experimental music, filmmaking, and conceptual practice. Across these fields, she has repeatedly questioned the boundaries separating an artwork from the person encountering it.
Her early instruction-based works often asked audiences to complete an idea through imagination or action. In Grapefruit, the artist’s influential book first published in 1964, written instructions become prompts for mental exercises and possible performances. Some are practical; others are poetic or deliberately impossible. The reader’s imagination becomes an essential part of the work.
That approach offers a useful way to understand IMAGINE PEACE. Its words do not prescribe a single response or provide a detailed political program. Instead, they open a space for individual interpretation. One visitor may connect the message to international conflict, another to community life, and another to the relationships and responsibilities that shape everyday experience.
This openness is characteristic of Ono’s broader practice. Rather than treating the audience solely as spectators, she often invites people to become participants in the production of meaning. The encounter may be brief, but the thought it generates can continue after the visitor has moved on.
Why the museum setting matters
MoMA’s first floor gives the installation a distinctive public context. Visitors do not need to seek out a specialist gallery or spend time deciphering an extended explanation before encountering its central message. The work meets people within the ordinary flow of a museum visit.
That placement also creates a contrast between the institutional environment and the portability of Ono’s language. Museums preserve and interpret works of art, while a phrase such as IMAGINE PEACE can travel through many settings. It can appear on a wall, a postcard, a billboard, or a digital screen without losing its basic invitation.
The work therefore operates on two levels. Within MoMA, it becomes part of a carefully organized museum presentation. Beyond the museum, it belongs to a wider history of public messaging in which words are intended to circulate, be repeated, and acquire meaning through encounters with different audiences.
Ono’s message does not become less complex simply because it is easy to read. Its brevity leaves questions open: What does peace mean in a particular situation? How might it be imagined differently? What, if anything, follows from imagining it? The installation offers no single answer, leaving visitors to supply their own reflections.
Continuing MoMA’s relationship with Ono
The presentation also extends a longstanding relationship between Ono and the museum. In 2019, MoMA presented PEACE is POWER, another commission expressing her commitment to peace activism. The 2026 installation continues that conversation while placing the message in a new moment and context.
A related work, THINK PEACE, ACT PEACE, SPREAD PEACE, IMAGINE PEACE, is scheduled to appear at John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Terminal 6 in fall 2026, according to MoMA. The airport presentation will bring a related message into a different kind of public space, one shaped by international travel and the movement of people across borders. (MoMA press release)
Together, these presentations point to the adaptability of Ono’s approach. The message can enter a museum or an airport, reaching audiences whose reasons for being in those places may have little in common. The setting changes, but the invitation remains recognizable.
The MoMA installation is organized by Alison Burstein, the Sue and Eugene Mercy, Jr. Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, with Lydia Mullin, Manager of Collection Galleries, Curatorial Affairs, and Elizabeth Wickham, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture.
An invitation that continues beyond the gallery
IMAGINE PEACE does not demand a long visit to make its central idea clear. Its significance lies partly in what happens after the words have been read. Visitors can stop, reflect, take the message with them, or continue into the museum without further engagement. The installation leaves room for those different responses.
For an artist whose career has consistently brought together conceptual experimentation and public engagement, that openness is central. The work does not promise that imagining peace will resolve conflict, nor does it offer an easy substitute for action. Instead, it places an idea before the public and allows each encounter to remain unfinished.
On MoMA’s first floor, Ono’s message becomes part of the everyday rhythm of New York: a brief interruption in the movement of a busy cultural institution. The phrase is simple, but its questions extend well beyond the museum walls. What peace might look like, how it can be imagined, and what people choose to do with that possibility remain with the viewer.
