Anyone who’s been to the Everson Museum lately has experienced a wide-range of Yoko Ono's works spanning six decades. The exhibit called “Remembering the Future” is the culmination of the museum’s year-long 50th anniversary celebration. Visitors will find it chaotic, interactive, and thought-provoking.
You typically don’t hear much noise in an art museum…but people hammering nails as part of an exhibit?
Or, the sound of piped-in birds?
The sprawling exhibit fills nearly every space, and most installations incorporate sound or video in some way, which echoes through the concrete museum. Curator DJ Hellerman says the “Painting to Hammer a Nail” piece is intentionally disruptive.
“It was meant to resonate through the whole museum and create a little chaos in the space, so it’s not meant to be so orderly,” Hellerman said. “A lot of the artwork in the show tries to undo some of the normal rules that you would typically expect of a museum: Don’t touch, be quiet, don’t touch the walls, don’t draw, if something is broken that’s bad. Here, if something is broken, that’s an opportunity to make something new. There’s a lot of different things in the show that kind of touch on those themes.”
Take, for example, “Add Color Refugee Boat,” where visitors are invited to paint on the walls and a boat in the middle of the room. Or, the “entrance” or “en-trance” to the second floor exhibits.
“Instead of having one entrance to the exhibition, you have five different ways to enter into the show. One of them actually just spits you right back out again, so then you get to choose the other entrances to the show.”
Hellerman says the exhibit does ask a lot of patrons in a way most do not. There’s “Sky Ladders”, that people can climb to get closer to the sky. Then there’s an installation with shards of broken Syracuse China.
“This is something called ‘Mend Piece.’ You have a broken cup and saucer, and the idea is to mend them into something new, to use these broken shards to create something of your own,” Hellerman said.
Nearby, “Line Piece” encourages patrons create art by taping or string to the walls, or to use a notebook to draw. In one room, 100 ropes anchored to an upper corner of the room fan out to a platform of heavy wooden beams to form “Morning Beams.”
The exhibit is even outside, but some might not even notice. Three dogwood trees have been planted on the museums tiny front lawn, where visitors are invited to tie wishes to the branches.
“My favorite wish so far is someone wrote, ‘I wish I could be a zoologist,’ which was super great. Some of them are really political. Somebody wished for ‘good pasta for everyone to eat,’ which I’m a fan of. It’s just really awesome to see, from very trivial to really personal and profound wishes that people are placing on the trees. It’s a really beautiful way to go into and come out of the exhibition,” Hellerman said.
Several of the installations touch on Ono’s passion for exposing social and political injustices against women, refugees, and others. She had her first museum retrospective at the Everson in 1971, which captured much attention when she and husband John Lennon came to town. Hellerman says nearly 50 years later, this exhibit is also sparking plenty of interest.
“There’s a lot of people coming into the museum. We’re seeing a lot of people that haven’t been to the museum before. We’re very, very busy. People are coming and they’re also staying, I think, for a little bit longer. Obviously there’s things to do instead of just look. Looking is really important, but you can paint, you can hammer, you can slide down a slide, or you can mend broken ceramics. So people are coming, they’re staying, and I think they’re coming back, too.”
Hellerman says the exhibit was curated with Yoko Ono Studios specifically for the Everson, and isn’t scheduled to travel. However, he says, parts of it have been installed elsewhere in different contexts. "Remembering the Future" runs through October 27th.
