Yoko Ono: Lumière de L’aube opens this week at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon. The exhibition follows One Woman Show at MoMA in New York, and is Yoko Ono’s first retrospective in France.

Ono was a significant influence on the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, and her work includes films, installations, performances, instruction-based texts, and participatory installations. Notwithstanding her international reputation, large exhibitions of Yoko Ono’s work were relatively infrequent until the last decade. Ono’s late husband, John Lennon, said that she is “the world’s most famous unknown artist: everyone knows her name, but no one knows what she actually does.”

MAC Lyon has a notable history of early solo exhibitions; Keith Haring, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Cai Guo-Qiang, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Marina Abramović and Ulay are just a partial list. The museum’s Renzo Piano-designed building functions perfectly for its avant-garde exhibitions program. It presents a Neoclassical façade towards Lyon’s great Parc de la Tête d’Or, but otherwise fits neatly into Piano’s modern Cité Internationale. Inside, MAC features a changeable wall system that can accommodate any possible gallery configuration with 2,800 square meters across three floors.

For Lumière de l’Aube (Light of the Dawn), MAC has devoted the entire building to more than 100 works by Yoko Ono that span from 1952 to 2016. The title may seem generic, but in Lyon is specific as a reference to the Lumière Brothers, the city’s history, and perhaps the development of new artistic mediums.

The exhibition features an entire section of Ono’s conceptual “instruction paintings,” which include simple instructions for action to be taken by the reader. Painting to Be Stepped On, for example, becomes a completed artwork only after it is covered with footprints. These works can only be realized with participation from people other than the artist. They can be performed by different people in different ways, and are always transformed with the passage of time.

In addition to the instruction pieces, there are large sections for music, text works, peaceful activities, and interaction. WAR IS OVER!, Bed-In for Peace, and Wish Tree are highlights of the latter two sections and of Yoko Ono’s work as a peace activist. Wish Tree, in particular, is participatory beyond this exhibition as an ongoing installation and series since 1996.

“Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree. Ask your friends to do the same. Keep wishing. Until the branches are covered with wishes.”

Wishes are collected and buried at the base of the Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island near Reykjavik, Iceland, and may also be mailed. At MAC Lyon, visitors are encouraged to create their own Wish Trees and share them online with #WishTrees and #YokoOnoLyon.

Yoko Ono: Lumière de L’aube opens on March 9 and continues through July 17, 2016.

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La Biennale de Lyon was launched in 1991 and has become one of the largest contemporary art events in the world, with greater attendance and broader representation than Manifesta and the Whitney Biennal. For its 13th edition in 2015, the Biennale de Lyon brings together 60 artists from 28 countries to explore the theme of La Vie Moderne.

The biennale was co-founded and is overseen by Thierry Raspail as Artistic Director. Raspail is also the Director of the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (MAC Lyon) – a position he has held since the museum’s creation in 1984. The guest curator for the biennale’s 13th edition is Ralph Rugoff, the Director of London’s Hayward Gallery.

The Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon is the biennale’s primary site with installations by 34 artists on all three levels. The museum building was designed by Renzo Piano with the Cité Internationale and was inaugurated in 1995 during the 3rd Biennale de Lyon. MAC Lyon has a notable history of early exhibitions for a panoply of major contemporary artists.

Side note: We saw Keith Haring here in 2008 before hipsters wore Keith Haring t-shirts, and we’re excited for Lumière in 2016 – Yoko Ono’s first retrospective in France, closely following MoMA’s 2015 exhibition.

In addition to MAC Lyon, the biennale has four other exhibition sites in Lyon. There is a sculpture at Parc de la Tête d’Or and a video installation at l’Institut Lumière in Monplaisir. There are 35 artists at La Sucrière, a former sugar factory in the redeveloped southern quarter of Presqu’île. Nearby, there’s an installation at the new Musée des Confluences.

At MAC Lyon, T.J. Wilcox’s In the Air is a panoramic film installation made in 2013 in New York. Interestingly, it is not very far from the reproduction of a 1901 Photorama at the Musée Lumière. Wilcox’s contemporary view of Manhattan is separated from Louis Lumière’s panorama of the port of Marseille by an ocean and a century, but each represent a version of La Vie Moderne with particular technology and urban views.

At La Sucrière, Hicham Berrada’s Mesk-ellil is a dark, humid garden planted with night-blooming jasmine. The installation reverses the plant’s day/night cycle with artificial daylight at night and artificial twilight during the day. The mesk-ellil, “musk of the night” in Arabic, releases perfume during the day for a sensory experience that inverts a natural system.

Magdi Mostafa’s The Surface of Spectral Scattering provides an aerial night view of Cairo with 10,000 LED bulbs, 23,000 connections, and 15 power centers that react to sound waves on the periphery of the installation, visualizing globalization across the ancient metropolis.

La Vie Moderne is a relatively ambiguous title, but becomes a multifarious theme for a biennale with artists from 28 countries. Narratives expand from divergent concerns of everyday life, and La Vie Moderne brings them together into a larger, contemporary global culture. The Biennale de Lyon opened on September 10 and continues to January 3, 2016.

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It’s the first day of summer.  Art Basel has concluded, but the art world doesn’t stop. There is much to see, so we outlined our top picks for summer exhibitions.

Since we previewed Anish Kapoor at the Château de Versailles, there have been so many articles about the sculpture that kind of looks like a vagina (it does not) and some vandalism. However, Instagram is full of evidence that the installations are amazing, and this is still our favorite summer exhibition.

The Fondazione Prada opened its new campus in Milan last month. The inaugural exhibitions include Serial Classic, with more than 70 works of Greek and Roman sculpture. Multiples in plaster, bronze, and marble explicate the reproduction of classical works and illustrate the methods used in the making of copies.

On June 7, the Orange County Museum of Art will open My Generation: Young Chinese Artists. The exhibition was first shown at the Tampa Museum of Art last year. We saw My Generation at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in December and can’t wait to see it in a new context at OCMA.

The Getty will open A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV on June 16. The exhibition was co-organized by the Getty Research Institute and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. At the tercentenary of the death of Louis XIV, the Sun King still holds influence on French art, style, and culture.

On July 4, the National Building Museum will open the BEACH in collaboration with the design firm Snarkitecture. The 10,000 square-foot installation will cover the museum’s Great Hall with an ocean of about one million plastic translucent balls. Following last summer’s BIG Maze at NBM and reminding us of Paris Plages, the BEACH will be DC’s best summer experience.

Christian Marclay’s The Clock will return to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on July 5. The 24-hour montage of thousands of moments of film clips, synchronized to local time, was screened at LACMA in 2011 and in 2012. The Clock will be on during open hours, but 24-hour screenings on July 25 and August 8 will be big events for art lovers to visit LACMA overnight. Expect food trucks.

The Venice Biennale is ongoing through November, but we recommend visiting in the summer. Of course Venice is hot and crowded, but the jet set have already left and the acqua alta haven’t yet arrived. The 56th edition of the Biennale, All the World’s Futures, includes 89 pavilions with works by 136 artists from 53 countries. It could take all summer to experience them all.

After all these, save the date for a few big events in the fall:

– The Biennale de Lyon, in its 13th edition as La Vie Moderne, opens at macLyon and around the city on September 10.

– Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament exhibition will open at MOCA on September 13.

– The Broad will open on September 20.

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