Yoko Ono

Artist, activist, musician

• Born: February 18, 1933
• Place of Birth: Tokyo, Japan

Yoko Ono earned attention as an avant-garde performance artist, filmmaker, and musician. Starting with her early work with the art collective known as Fluxus, she created works that often challenged perceptions of femininity, sexuality, and beauty. The widow of John Lennon of The Beatles, Ono also used her fame and talents to work for peace initiatives around the world and devoted much of her life to supporting the arts, antiwar causes, and human rights.

Full name: Yoko Ono (YOH-koh OH-noh)

Birth name: Ono Yoko

Early Life

Artist, activist, and musician. Yoko Ono was born into a prestigious and wealthy Japanese family. Her mother, the granddaughter of the founder of Japan’s Yasuda banking conglomerate, and her father, a descendant of a ninth-century Japanese emperor, raised her in a strict, traditional household. Ono’s upbringing was marked by her father’s long absences and her mother’s unaffectionate parenting. Her father moved to San Francisco before her birth, and she did not meet him until 1935 when the family joined him in California. After the family returned to Japan in 1937, Ono was enrolled in Tokyo’s exclusive Peers School. After her family moved to New York in 1940 and then back to Japan again in 1941, she attended Keimei Gakuen, a Christian school. While in school, Ono studied piano and voice. She made her performance debut at age four. Her father, a classical pianist, discouraged her desire to be a composer and forced her to study singing, thinking it was more appropriate for women.

In 1945, following the firebombing of Tokyo near the end of World War II, Ono escaped to the countryside with her mother and brother. They traveled with a wheelbarrow, selling various pieces of property to avoid starvation. During this time, Ono’s father became a captive in Hanoi, Vietnam, and was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Thailand. In 1946, after the war, Ono went back to the Peers School. In 1951, she became the first female student accepted to study philosophy at Gakushuin University. However, she dropped out after two semesters. When her family again moved to New York, Ono enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College. The school was not to her liking, and she dropped out. She moved to Lower Manhattan, attracted by the neighborhood’s active arts culture. This angered her parents, who cut her off financially.

Life’s Work

In 1956, Ono married composer Toshi Ichiyanaga. The couple divorced in 1962. Shortly thereafter, Ono married Anthony Cox, also a musician and artist. She and Cox became active in New York’s avant-garde art scene. When their daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, was born, Cox became the girl’s primary caretaker, and Ono continued working as an artist. Ono used her apartment as an art gallery and performance space. She created artwork that was both conceptual and interactive. In 1964, Ono debuted Cut Piece, a piece of performance art featuring an element that would become central to Ono’s work: audience participation. In Cut Piece, Ono would sit down on stage and have members of the audience take turns cutting her clothing with a pair of scissors until she was nearly naked. She also made experimental films, such as Bottoms (1966), which consisted simply of close-up shots of a series of the bare buttocks of people walking on a treadmill; Up Your Legs Forever (1970), with camera shots looking up women’s skirts; and Fly (1970), a film of a fly walking along a nude woman’s body.

Ono’s originality, openness, and willingness to take risks in her work made her well-known in the New York art scene and the larger art world. However, she became famous after beginning a relationship with the Beatles guitarist and singer-songwriter John Lennon, whom she met in 1966 at London’s Indica Gallery and married in 1969. Their marriage encouraged Yoko’s return to musical performance. Although trained as an opera singer, Yoko was interested in experimental music, and she and Lennon began producing and performing her pieces. The 1968 Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins was released to almost total critical antagonism. Calling the music shrill and unlistenable, critics panned Ono’s contributions. In 1969, Ono and Lennon held “Bed-Ins for Peace” in Amsterdam and Canada to protest the Vietnam War. Similar to a sit-in, the couple stayed in bed for two weeks on two separate occasions, regularly talking to members of the media to promote world peace and protest war.

When the Beatles broke up in 1970, many blamed Ono, claiming she had turned Lennon away from the band and the rock-and-roll genre. She was often vilified in the press as the “dragon lady” who destroyed the world’s most beloved pop music group. Though later accounts from the Beatles themselves rejected this narrative, her name would often continue to be used synonymously with negative female influence on male relationships. Meanwhile, Ono's personal life had its own challenges. In 1971 her former husband Anthony Cox, took their daughter, raising her in a small Christian sect that he later described as a cult. (It was not until 1997 that Ono and Kyoko were reconnected.) Ono and Lennon were separated for a time from 1973 to 1974 but reconciled. The couple had a son, Sean, in 1975.

Despite the almost constant criticism of her music, Ono continued to record and produced more than thirty albums with Lennon (including under the name the Plastic Ono Band in the early 1970s) and on her own. Some of her collaborations were better received; her and Lennon's album Double Fantasy (1980) peaked at number one on the Billboard chart and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1981. Bands such as Sonic Youth and the B-52s later credited Ono as a major influence. In the years after John Lennon was shot and killed in December 1980, Ono served as the caretaker of his cultural legacy and manager of his estate. She continued to espouse the concepts of love and peace that were prevalent in the musical and artistic works the couple created throughout the late 1960s and 1970s.

Ono's public image improved notably into the twenty-first century as she gained more recognition beyond her connection to Lennon and the Beatles. She remained active as an artist, often winning critical acclaim. She received the International Association of Art Critics’ prestigious Best Museum Show Award for the retrospective Yes Yoko Ono in 2001. In 2005, she was awarded the Japan Society of New York Lifetime Achievement Award. That same year, she edited the book Memories of John Lennon. For her art, Ono was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2009. She earned attention for several installation works in the 2010s, including Earth Peace in Folkestone, England, in 2014 and the permanent piece Skylanding in Chicago, Illinois, in 2016. Her work was featured in a special retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2015. Another exhibition honoring the artistic career of Ono appeared in 2022 at Kunsthaus Zurich. Ono was heavily involved in helping to curate the exhibition celebrating her art and performance art titled Yoko Ono: This Room Moves at the Same Speed As the Clouds.

Ono also continued her prolific musical career. She produced an Off-Broadway musical in 1994 and released numerous albums and tracks over the years. One of her higher-profile releases was the album Yes, I’m a Witch (2007), featuring a collection of cover versions of Ono's songs by various contemporary musicians, with her on lead vocals. In 2009, she reformed the Plastic Ono Band, and in 2013 released the album Take Me to the Land of Hell, which was produced by her son, Sean Lennon. Her track "Move on Fast" reached number one on the dance music charts in 2011, giving her the record of the oldest performer to top that category. An album of reimagined versions of songs from throughout her career was released in 2018 as Warzone. In 2021, Ono helped launch the video streaming service Coda Collection, which focused on music-related content such as concert footage and documentaries. Ono's work was featured in the exhibition Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind in 2024. This retrospective highlighted key moments across her multidisciplinary artistic career.

In addition to and often in connection with her art and music, Ono continued her distinguished efforts as an activist for global peace and other causes. In 2002, Ono created the LennonOno Grant for Peace Activism. She received many honors for her dedication to nonviolent activism, such as the 2011 Hiroshima Art Prize, given to artists whose work promotes peace and human rights, and for her art, including the 2012 Oskar Kokoschka Prize. Ono continued to perform and create while still participating actively in peace and antiwar causes. In 2010, she was named the first Global Autism Ambassador by the organization Autism Speaks.

Significance

Although Yoko Ono is probably best known as John Lennon’s wife and collaborator, she is a major figure in her own right in the world of conceptual and performance art. The creator of numerous music albums, experimental films, and interactive and conceptual art installations, Ono is acclaimed and influential in the avant-garde art scene. As an artist, she helped to bring issues of feminism and violence to the fore and also created work that embrace joy and celebrate the resiliency of the human spirit. Her work as an artist and musician is matched in scope and breadth with her work as an advocate for global peace and a supporter of philanthropic work and nonviolent political activism. Since 2021, Ono has resigned herself primarily to private life, only making rare public appearances. The management of Lennon and Ono's affairs and estate has been taken over by their son, Sean.

Bibliography

Cumming, Laura. "Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind Review - Huge, Moving and Full of Surprises." The Guardian, 18 Feb. 2024, www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/feb/18/yoko-ono-music-of-the-mind-tate-modern-review-huge-moving-and-full-of-surprises. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Hans Ulrich Obrist & Yoko Ono: The Conversation Series. Koln, Germany: Konig, 2010. Print.

Ono, Yoko. Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings. New York: Simon, 2000. Print.

Phares, Heather. "Yoko Ono." AllMusic, 2021, www.allmusic.com/artist/yoko-ono-mn0000521704/biography. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Raymer, Miles. "Yoko Ono Talks John Lennon, Art, and Paul McCartney's Complaints." Esquire, Hearst Communications, 2 Oct. 2015. Web. 22 June 2016.

Rowland, Hazel. "Yoko Ono: The World's Most Famous Unknown Artist." Culture Trip, 5 Jan. 2017, theculturetrip.com/asia/japan/articles/yoko-ono-the-world-s-most-famous-unknown-artist/. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Remnick, David. “Paul McCartney Doesn't Really Want to Stop the Show.” The New Yorker, 11 Oct. 2021, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/paul-mccartney-doesnt-really-want-to-stop-the-show. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Sharp, Ken. Starting Over: The Making of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’sDouble Fantasy. New York: Gallery, 2010. Print.