Profile

Yoko Ono, born February 18, 1933, is a Japanese artist, singer-songwriter, and peace activist. She is the second wife and widow of John Lennon and is also known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking. John Lennon called her "the world's most famous unknown artist, everyone knows her name, but no one knows what she actually does”.

By the early 1960s Ono was working on the periphery of the neo-Dadaist Fluxus group, a loose association of artists in Europe, Asia, and America who experimented with mixing poetry, music, and the visual arts, through a wide spectrum of activities including concerts and events. When she settled in London in 1966, the Indica Gallery put up a show that included Ceiling Painting (Yes Painting).

In the decades since this London show, Ono has continued to enlarge the boundaries of her art in diverse media. After her marriage to John Lennon in 1969, she collaborated with him on a number of musical projects, creating a bridge between avant-garde music and popular rock in such releases as Unfinished Music for Two Virgins (1968), Wedding Album (1969), and Double Fantasy (1980).

During the 1980s, influenced by the rampant materialism of the decade, Ono revisited some of her 1960s objects. She transformed works that were originally light and transparent into bronze, symbolizing a shift from what she calls "the Sixties sky" to the new "age of commodity and solidity." In the 1990s Ono's prolific output of interactive installations, site-specific works, Internet projects, concerts, and recordings have been widely represented in numerous venues across Europe, American, Japan, and Australia. The first American retrospective exhibition of her work, YES YOKO ONO, was on tour throughout the United States in 2000-01.