Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo, Japan, on February 18, 1933, and grew up in a prominent Japanese family. She studied piano and voice from childhood, wrote poetry and plays, and gave a performance at the age of four. In 1951, she became the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushūin University in Tokyo, leaving after two semesters.

Her family later moved to the New York area, where Ono studied at Sarah Lawrence College before leaving the school. She moved to Lower Manhattan and became involved with the city’s active arts culture. During World War II, she experienced the firebombing of Tokyo and was sent to the countryside with her mother and siblings, an experience that influenced her later opposition to war.

Ono emerged in New York’s avant-garde art scene during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her downtown Manhattan loft became a venue for experimental concerts, exhibitions, and performance events, including programs organized with composer La Monte Young. She also connected with artists and composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Nam June Paik, and George Maciunas, and became associated with the Fluxus collective.

Her work challenged the conventional boundaries between artist, audience, and everyday life. Painting to Be Stepped On (1960) invited viewers to walk across a canvas, while Grapefruit (1964) collected written instructions such as “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” These instruction-based works made imagination and participation central parts of the artistic experience.

Cut Piece, first presented in 1964, became Ono’s best-known performance work. Sitting passively onstage, she invited audience members to use scissors to cut pieces from her clothing. The performance confronted viewers with questions about vulnerability, sexual violence, femininity, and the role of the audience, and was later recognized as a landmark of feminist art.

Ono also made experimental films, including No. 4, also known as Bottoms (1966), along with Up Your Legs Forever (1970) and Fly (1970). She met filmmaker and musician Anthony Cox through the New York avant-garde scene, and he helped coordinate some of her early conceptual events. Their daughter, Kyoko, was born in 1963.

In 1966, Ono moved to London and met John Lennon at an exhibition of her work at the Indica Gallery. Their artistic collaboration began with experimental films and recordings, including Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (1968), and they married in 1969.

Ono and Lennon collaborated on music, film, performance, and political activism. Their 1969 “Bed-Ins for Peace” in Amsterdam and Montreal opened their hotel room to journalists as a platform for promoting world peace and protesting the Vietnam War. The events brought Ono a large international audience, though the attention was accompanied by intense criticism and public hostility.

Ono began a music career with Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band in 1970. Her recordings combined improvisational rock with ululating vocals influenced by Kabuki and the operas of Alban Berg. Later albums included Fly (1971) and Approximately Infinite Universe (1973). Although her experimental style divided listeners, later musicians and groups including Sonic Youth and the B-52s credited her as an influence.

Ono and Lennon collaborated again on Double Fantasy (1980), which reached number one on the Billboard chart and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Lennon was fatally shot by Mark David Chapman outside the Dakota in New York City on December 8, 1980.

Ono continued recording after Lennon’s death. Her notable releases included the dance-club hit “Walking on Thin Ice” and the album Season of Glass, both released in 1981, followed by Rising (1995), Between My Head and the Sky (2009), and Take Me to the Land of Hell (2013). She also released Yes, I’m a Witch (2007), a collection of reinterpretations of her songs by contemporary musicians, and Warzone (2018), an album of reimagined material.

Her song “Move on Fast” reached number one on the dance music charts in 2011. Ono also wrote the musical New York Rock, which was produced Off-Broadway in 1994, and helped launch the music-focused video streaming service Coda Collection in 2021.

In addition to her own recordings, Ono oversaw the release of Lennon’s unpublished material and worked to preserve his artistic legacy. In 2017, the National Music Publishers’ Association began the process of adding her as a songwriter on Lennon’s “Imagine,” citing Lennon’s view that the song should be credited to both of them.

Ono’s art received major institutional recognition through retrospectives and international exhibitions. The Whitney Museum of American Art presented a retrospective of her work in 1989, and Yes Yoko Ono opened at the Japan Society Gallery in New York in 2000 before traveling to other venues. She received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2011.

Her later installations included Earth Peace in Folkestone, England, and Skylanding in Chicago. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of her early work in 2015, and Kunsthaus Zürich mounted another exhibition in 2022. Her multidisciplinary career was also featured in Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, an exhibition staged in Chicago and Germany in 2024.

Ono’s activism has centered on peace, antiwar causes, human rights, and support for the arts. She established the LennonOno Grant for Peace in 2002, was named the first Global Autism Ambassador by Autism Speaks in 2010, and co-founded Artists Against Fracking with Sean Lennon in 2012.

Ono occasionally acted during her multidisciplinary career, most notably in short films made with John Lennon during the 1970s. Her screen work also included a voice role in Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated feature Isle of Dogs (2018).

Her acting was one part of a wider practice that combined film, music, performance, written instructions, and installation. Across these forms, she used participation and unconventional presentation to challenge established ideas about art and authorship.