Born: 1933 in Tokyo.

Yoko Ono is a conceptual artist who has worked in in a variety of media incorporating experimental film, performance art, text-based works and music. She was brought up in Tokyo and initially studied at Gakushuin College then, following her family’s move to America, at Sarah Lawrence College, New York.

In New York she became influenced by the Fluxus Group, a collection of artists, musicians and writers who experimented across different art forms; she joined other avant garde artists in downtown Manhattan and began making art, acknowledging the influences of the radical musician John Cage and Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp.

In the early 1960s she began to exhibit her conceptual art in galleries in New York and to organise concerts and other cultural events. In 1966 she had an exhibition in London which was attended by John Lennon and they became partners until his murder in 1980. Ono and Lennon collaborated on many successful musical works and became ardent peace campaigners.

In 1989 the Witney Museum held a major exhibition of her art works and films and in 2001 she was the subject of a 40-year retrospective which won the International Association Art Critics Award. More recently, in 2014, an exhibition of Ono’s work was held at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and in 2015 a one-woman show ‘Yoko Ono 1960-1971’ will be held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

 

Two Thirds of a Glass Key Multiple