Yoko Ono Biography

Yoko Ono is a Japanese multidisciplinary artist, singer, songwriter, and peace campaigner recognized for her work in performance art, music, and cinema. She is the widow and second wife of musician John Lennon. Ono grew up in Tokyo and attended Gakushuin University. She dropped out of her program after two years and returned to her family in New York in 1953. She attended Sarah Lawrence College for a while before being active in New York City's downtown artists scene, notably the Fluxus group. She met Lennon for the first time in 1966 at her own art exhibition in London, and they married in 1968. With their performance, Bed-Ins for Peace, in Amsterdam and Montreal in 1969, Ono and Lennon famously utilized their honeymoon at the Hilton Amsterdam as a venue for public protests against the Vietnam War. She pushed feminism in her music, inspiring musicians as different as the B-52s and Meredith Monk. With the chart-topping album Double Fantasy, a duet with Lennon released three weeks before his death, Ono gained financial and critical success in 1980. The public's perception of Ono's work has evolved over time, thanks to a 1989 exhibition at a Whitney Museum branch and the 1992 publication of the six-disc box set Onobox. Her work has also been shown in retrospectives at the Japan Society in New York City in 2001, Bielefeld, Germany, and the United Kingdom in 2008, and Frankfurt and Bilbao, Spain, in 2013. In 2009, she earned the Venice Biennale's Golden Lion Honor for lifetime accomplishment, and in 2012, she was awarded the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Austria's top award for applied contemporary art. Ono, as John Lennon's widow, tries to protect his legacy. Strawberry Fields in New York City, the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, and the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, Japan were all sponsored by her (which closed in 2010). She has made major philanthropic donations to the arts, peace, disaster assistance in the Philippines and Japan, and other causes. Ono's social activity continues, with the establishment of a biannual $50,000 LennonOno Peace Grant in 2002 and the co-founding of the organisation Artists Against Fracking in 2012. From her marriage to Anthony Cox, she has a daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, and a son, Sean Taro Ono Lennon, with whom she works musically.

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