Yoko Ono has been a prominent and influential figure in the art world for nearly six decades. Although she is best known as a performer and musician, Ono has also created significant works of poetry, film, sculpture, and public art. During the 1960s, she was associated with the New York avant-garde, creating experimental performances and interactive objects, often in collaboration with the international, multidisciplinary group Fluxus. After her marriage in 1968 to John Lennon of the Beatles, the artist concentrated on music, film, and antiwar activism. In recent decades, she has produced large-scale bronze sculptures and public art works; performed her music with the Plastic Ono Band; and become an important spokesperson for causes that promote human rights and world peace. Throughout her career, Ono has maintained a deep faith in art’s ability to transform and uplift.
Early Life and Education
Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933, the eldest child of a wealthy banking family. Both her parents were deeply interested in Western and Japanese music, and Ono studied piano from an early age. In 1951, after her family moved to the United States, she began studying composition at Sarah Lawrence University. By 1956, she had dropped out of college and was living in New York with her first husband, avant-garde pianist and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi.
The 1960s
Event Scores and Instruction Paintings, Lighting Piece, Cut Piece, Painting to Hammer a Nail In, Grapefruit
While at Sarah Lawrence, Ono began writing so-called Event Scores: brief, poetic instructions for performances that anyone could enact. Lighting Piece (1955) reads: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” Cut Piece (1964) instructs the performer to sit motionless onstage as audience members take turns cutting off a piece of his or her clothing. One of Ono’s best-known works in any medium, Cut Piece explores the relationship between artist, artwork, and viewer and today is considered an early feminist comment on gender politics. The Walker’s collection includes a video recording of Ono’s 1964 performance of the work at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York.
Ono’s Instruction Paintings were objects, usually based on her Event Scores, meant to be completed by the viewer. Painting to Hammer a Nail In (1961/1966) was a wooden panel from which a hammer hung on a chain; a jar of nails sat on a chair below it. Viewers were invited to hammer one of the nails into the panel. When its surface was covered, the work was considered finished. When Lennon saw the piece at a 1966 exhibition, he asked Ono if he could hammer an imaginary nail into the panel. His question inspired her to make a version of the work in stainless steel and glass, which she dedicated to him. Many of Ono’s Event Scores and Instruction Paintings were published in her conceptual art book Grapefruit (1964).
Collaborations with Lennon and Antiwar Activism
Collaborations with John Lennon, Bed-In for Peace, War Is Over!, “Imagine”
Lennon and Ono married in 1969 and spent their honeymoon performing Bed-In for Peace, publicizing their opposition to the Vietnam War by inviting reporters into their hotel bedroom to debate the topic. Later that year, the couple began a multimedia campaign that included advertisements, billboards, posters, radio spots, and postcards that read: “War Is Over! If you want it. Love and Peace from John & Yoko.” Also in 1969, the pair cowrote the iconic pop song “Imagine,” whose lyrics offer a hopeful vision of a world in which people live in harmony. Because of their fame, Ono and Lennon’s message of peace was wide reaching, transforming their artworks into cultural and political statements and giving voice to an entire generation.
Filmmaking
Films, No. 4, Fly
Between 1966 and 1971, Ono created a handful of films that occupy a unique place between art, performance, and experimental practice. No. 4 (1966), also known as Bottoms, shows the naked buttocks of a group of the artist’s friends as they walk on a turntable set up in her apartment. Both humorous and erotic, the film took on a political overtone when Ono later suggested that the bottoms could serve as signatures on a petition for peace. The 1970 film Fly follows the travels of a common housefly over the terrain of a motionless, naked female body. Its soundtrack, a vocal piece composed and performed by Ono, matches the fly’s movements; its themes of feminine passivity and voyeurism echo those of Cut Piece.
Late Work
During the 1980s, Ono broadened her practice even further, exploring the medium of bronze in works like Endangered Species 2319–2322 (1992), a figurative sculpture with a foreboding theme. Her public artworks include the Imagine Peace Tower (2007), a beam of light periodically projected into the night sky over Reykjavík, Iceland. Since 2009, her inimitable vocals have been featured in the Plastic Ono Band, which she formed with John Lennon in 1969 and has since revived in collaboration with their son, Sean Lennon.
Philanthropy and Awards
Ono has given generously to many arts and humanitarian causes; she has also established several private awards, including Courage Awards for the Arts, given annually to artists who have “sought the truth in their work,” and the biennial LennonOno Grant for Peace.
Ono herself has received numerous honors, including the 2016 NME (New Musical Express) Inspiration Award, the 2012 Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Medal: International Human Rights Award, the 2009 Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and Grammy Awards in 1982 and 2001. In 2016, she was elected to the National Academy.
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