Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese retired artist, musician, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking.
Ono was born and grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York City in 1952 to join her family. She became involved with New York City's downtown artists scene in the early 1960s, which included the Fluxus group, and became widely known outside the contemporary art world in 1969 when she married English musician John Lennon of the Beatles, with whom she would subsequently record as a duo in the Plastic Ono Band. The couple used their honeymoon as a stage for public protests against the Vietnam War with what they called a bed-in. She and Lennon remained married until he was murdered in front of the couple's apartment building, The Dakota, on December 8, 1980. Together, they had one son, Sean, who later also became a musician.
Ono began a career in popular music in 1969, forming the Plastic Ono Band with Lennon and producing a number of avant-garde music albums in the 1970s. She achieved commercial and critical success in 1980 with the chart-topping album Double Fantasy, a collaboration with Lennon which was released three weeks before his murder, winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. To date, she has had twelve number one singles on the US Dance charts, and in 2016 was named the 11th most successful dance club artist of all time by Billboard magazine. Many musicians have paid tribute to Ono as an artist in her own right and as a muse and icon, including the B-52's, Sonic Youth and Meredith Monk.
As Lennon's widow, Ono works to preserve his legacy. She funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan's Central Park, the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, and the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, Japan (which closed in 2010). She has made significant philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace and disaster relief in Japan and the Philippines, and other such causes. In 2002, she inaugurated a biennial $50,000 LennonOno Grant for Peace. In 2012, she received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award and co-founded the group Artists Against Fracking.
Biography Early life and family Ono was born in Tokyo on February 18, 1933, to father and mother (1911–1999). Eisuke was a wealthy banker and former classical pianist who came from a long line of samurai warrior-scholars. Isoko was the granddaughter of , an affiliate of the Yasuda clan and zaibatsu. Her brother-in-law was the diplomat Toshikazu Kase, who was present at the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, which ended World War II.
The kanji characters of Yoko's given name () mean "ocean child". Two weeks before her birth, Eisuke was transferred to San Francisco, California, by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank. The rest of the family followed soon after, with Ono first meeting her father when she was two years old. Her younger brother Keisuke was born in December 1936.
In 1937, the family was transferred back to Japan, and Ono enrolled at Tokyo's elite Gakushūin (also known as the Peers School), one of the most exclusive schools in Japan. Ono was enrolled in piano lessons from the age of 4, until the age of 12 or 13. She attended kabuki performances with her mother, who was trained in shamisen, koto, otsuzumi, kotsuzumi, nagauta, and could read Japanese musical scores.
The family moved to New York City in 1940. The next year, Eisuke was transferred from New York City to Hanoi in French Indochina, and the family returned to Japan. Ono was enrolled in Keimei Gakuen, an exclusive Christian primary school run by the Mitsui family. She remained in Tokyo throughout World War II and the fire-bombing of March 9, 1945, during which she was sheltered with other family members in a special bunker in Tokyo's Azabu district, away from the heavy bombing. Ono later went to the Karuizawa mountain resort with members of her family.
Starvation was rampant in the destruction that followed the Tokyo bombings. Ono said it was during this period in her life that she developed her "aggressive" attitude. Stories tell of her mother bringing a large number of goods to the countryside, where they were bartered for food. In one anecdote, her mother traded a German-made sewing machine for of rice to feed the family. During this time, Ono's father, who had been in Hanoi, was believed to be in a prisoner of war camp in China. Ono told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on October 16, 2007, that "He was in French Indochina, which is Vietnam actually... in Saigon. He was in a concentration camp."
After the war ended in 1945, Ono remained in Japan when her family moved to the United States and settled in Scarsdale, New York, an affluent town north of midtown Manhattan. By April 1946, Gakushūin was reopened and Ono re-enrolled. The school, located near the Tokyo Imperial Palace, had not been damaged by the war, and Ono found herself a classmate of Prince Akihito, the future emperor of Japan. At 14 years old, she took up vocal training in lieder-singing.
College and downtown beginnings Ono graduated from Gakushūin in 1951 and was accepted into the philosophy program of Gakushuin University as the first woman to enter the department. However, she left the school after two semesters.
Ono joined her family in New York in September 1952,"New York, New York Passenger and Crew Lists, 1909, 1925–1957," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:2HMN-WZL : March 2, 2021), Yoko Ono, 1952; citing Immigration, New York City, New York, United States, NARA microfilm publication T715 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.). enrolling at nearby Sarah Lawrence College. Ono's parents approved of her college choice, but disapproved of her lifestyle and chastised her for befriending people they felt were beneath her.
At Sarah Lawrence, Ono studied poetry with Alastair Reid, English literature with Kathryn Mansell, and music composition with the Viennese-trained André Singer. Ono has said that her heroes at this time were the twelve-tone composers Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. She said, "I was just fascinated with what they could do. I wrote some twelve-tone songs, then my music went into [an] area that my teacher felt was really a bit off track, and... he said, 'Well, look, there are people who are doing things like what you do, and they're called avant-garde. Singer introduced her to the work of Edgar Varèse, John Cage, and Henry Cowell.
In 1956 Ono dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College feeling "asphyxiated by conservative teachers". The same year Ono married Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, who was studying at Juilliard and later became well known in Tokyo's experimental community. Ono's parents opposed the marriage, and even though they hosted a reception, they cut off Ono financially after the wedding.
After leaving college Ono moved to New York in 1957, supporting herself through secretarial work and lessons in the traditional Japanese arts at the Japan Society.
Ono has often been associated with the Fluxus group, a loose association of Dada-inspired avant-garde artists which was founded in the early 1960s by Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas. Maciunas promoted her work, giving Ono her first solo exhibition at his AG Gallery in New York in 1961. He formally invited Ono to join Fluxus, but she declined because she wanted to remain independent. However, she did collaborate with Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, George Brecht, and the poet Jackson Mac Low, among others associated with the group.
Ono first met John Cage through his student Ichiyanagi Toshi, in Cage's experimental composition class at the New School for Social Research. She was introduced to more of Cage's unconventional neo-Dadaism first hand, and via his New York City protégés Allan Kaprow, Brecht, Mac Low, Al Hansen and the poet Dick Higgins.
After Cage finished teaching at the New School in the summer of 1960, Ono was determined to rent a place to present her works along with the work of other avant-garde artists in the city. She eventually found an inexpensive loft in downtown Manhattan at 112 Chambers Street and used the apartment as a studio and living space, also allowing composer La Monte Young to organize concerts in the loft. They both held a series of events there from December 1960 through June 1961; the events were attended by people such as Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim. Ono and Young both claimed to have been the primary curator of these events, with Ono claiming to have been eventually pushed into a subsidiary role by Young. Ono presented work only once during the series.
In 1961, Ono had her first major public performance in a concert at the 258-seat Carnegie Recital Hall (smaller than the "Main Hall"). This concert featured radical experimental music and performances.
The Chambers Street series hosted some of Ono's earliest conceptual artwork, including Painting to Be Stepped On, a scrap of canvas on the floor that became a completed artwork as footprints were left on it. With that work, Ono suggested that a work of art no longer needed to be mounted on a wall and inaccessible. She showed this work and other instructional work again at Macunias's AG Gallery in July 1961. After Ono set a painting on fire at one performance, Cage advised her to treat the paper with flame retardant. She is credited for the album cover art for the album Nirvana Symphony by Toshiro Mayuzumi, released by Time Records in 1962.
After living apart for several years, Ono and Ichiyanagi filed for divorce in 1962. Ono returned home to live with her parents, and, suffering from clinical depression, was briefly placed into a Japanese mental institution.
Early career and motherhood On November 28, 1962, Ono married Anthony Cox, an American film producer and art promoter who had been instrumental in securing her release from the mental institution. Ono's second marriage was annulled on March 1, 1963, because she had neglected to finalize her divorce from Ichiyanagi. After finalizing that divorce, Cox and Ono married again on June 6, 1963. She gave birth to their daughter Kyoko Chan Cox two months later, on August 8, 1963.
The marriage quickly fell apart, but the couple continued working together for the sake of their joint careers. They performed at Tokyo's Sogetsu Hall, with Ono lying atop a piano played by John Cage. Soon, the couple returned to New York with Kyoko. In the early years of the marriage, Ono left most of Kyoko's parenting to Cox while she pursued her art full-time, with Cox also managing her publicity.
Ono had a second engagement at the Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965, in which she debuted Cut Piece. In September 1966, Ono visited London to meet artist and political activist Gustav Metzger's Destruction in Art Symposium in September 1966. She was the only woman artist chosen to perform her own events and one of only two invited to speak. She premiered The Fog Machine during her Concert of Music for the Mind at the Bluecoat Society of Arts in Liverpool, England in 1967.
Ono and Cox divorced on February 2, 1969, and she married John Lennon later that same year. During a 1971 custody battle, Cox disappeared with their eight-year-old daughter. He won custody after successfully claiming that Ono was an unfit mother due to her drug use. Ono's ex-husband changed Kyoko's name to "Ruth Holman" and subsequently raised the girl in an organization known as the Church of the Living Word. Ono and Lennon searched for Kyoko for years, but to no avail. She would finally see Kyoko again in 1998.
Relationship with John Lennon