Yoko Ono Biography Quotes 31 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Yoko Ono was born on February 18, 1933, in Tokyo, Japan, into a family with ties to banking and classical music. Her father, a banker who also played piano, and her mother, from an influential merchant family, exposed her early to music, literature, and international travel. As a child she studied classical voice and piano and learned to navigate two cultures, spending periods in the United States and Japan before, during, and after the Second World War. The wartime years were formative; she experienced evacuation and scarcity, memories that later informed her spare, instruction-based art about survival, empathy, and imagination. After the war she returned to school in Japan and briefly studied philosophy at Gakushuin University before moving back to the United States, settling with family in the New York suburbs.

Education and Entry into the Avant-Garde
Ono attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she became immersed in poetry and experimental music. In downtown Manhattan she found a community among composers and artists exploring indeterminacy and performance. She hosted groundbreaking loft concerts on Chambers Street in 1960, 61 with the composer La Monte Young, welcoming figures such as John Cage and members of a nascent Fluxus network led by George Maciunas. Collaborations and friendships with artists including Nam June Paik helped shape her cross-disciplinary approach. Ono developed Instruction Paintings, works realized by written directives that invited the audience to complete the piece in their own minds or through simple acts. She self-published the conceptual score book Grapefruit in 1964, a touchstone of conceptual art. That same year she performed Cut Piece in Kyoto and Tokyo, sitting stoically while audience members were invited to cut away her clothing, a seminal performance about vulnerability, consent, and the social gaze.

London, New York, and Fluxus
Between Japan, New York, and London in the mid-1960s, she consolidated a language of participation, chance, and humor. Exhibited works such as Ceiling Painting (Yes Painting), Painting to Hammer a Nail, and Apple asked viewers to complete or imagine the work. Film experiments followed: with collaborators she created pieces such as No. 4 (Bottoms), a serial portrait of human walking, and later works like Fly that translated her conceptual scores into moving image and sound.

Partnership with John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band
Ono met John Lennon in 1966 at the Indica Gallery in London, where he encountered her ladder-and-loupe piece directing viewers to the tiny affirmative word YES on the ceiling. Their relationship, controversial in the glare of popular culture, quickly deepened into a prolific artistic partnership. They married in 1969 and turned their union into a peace platform, staging Bed-Ins in Amsterdam and Montreal, recording Give Peace a Chance, and launching the War Is Over! If You Want It billboard campaign. Together they formed the Plastic Ono Band, a fluid ensemble that recorded raw, confessional albums in 1970; Ono's companion record, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, pushed vocal and noise experimentation that would later influence punk and avant-garde rock. They made the politically charged Some Time in New York City with collaborators including Phil Spector and New York musicians, and her solo albums Fly and Approximately Infinite Universe expanded her writing and feminist critique.

The couple navigated pressure from the lingering world of the Beatles; Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were part of the wider circle in which Ono and Lennon operated, even as public narratives often cast her as a disruptive presence. In fact, she and Lennon worked as creative equals, co-devising projects across media. Decades later, her role in the genesis of Imagine was publicly acknowledged when she was granted co-writing credit in 2017.

Music, Film, and Performance
Ono's practice remained resolutely interdisciplinary. She and Lennon made films such as Rape for European television, and her performance works from the 1960s and 1970s continued to be staged internationally. After the 1980 release of Double Fantasy, a joint album that signaled Lennon's return to recording and Ono's broadening pop sensibility, Lennon was murdered outside their home at the Dakota in New York. The single Walking on Thin Ice, on which Lennon had been working in the studio just hours earlier, became her signature song and later seeded a series of successful dance remixes in the 2000s that brought her to new generations of listeners.

Personal Life
Ono's private life intersected with her art. Her first marriage, to composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, coincided with her early New York years. With filmmaker and producer Anthony Cox, her second husband, she had a daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, in 1963. A difficult custody dispute in the early 1970s separated mother and daughter for many years; they reunited in the 1990s. With John Lennon, whom she married in 1969, she had a son, Sean Ono Lennon, in 1975. During Lennon's hiatus from the music business, he focused on parenting, while Ono managed the couple's business affairs and artistic ventures. The couple's inner circle, which at times included May Pang during Lennon's mid-1970s period away from the Dakota, reflected complex personal arrangements shaped by the pressures of fame and the pair's unconventional approach to life and work. In the years after 1980, Ono maintained a long partnership with designer and art dealer Sam Havadtoy.

Activism and Philanthropy
Ono's activism for peace, women's rights, and freedom of expression threaded through all of her work. She supported memorials and platforms for public reflection, notably helping to create Strawberry Fields in Central Park in memory of Lennon. In 2002 she established the LennonOno Grant for Peace to recognize activists and artists advancing nonviolence. With Sean Ono Lennon she co-founded Artists Against Fracking in 2012, aligning environmental advocacy with her long-standing antiwar stance. In 2007 she dedicated the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik, an outdoor light sculpture activated annually to promote global peace.

Exhibitions and Recognition
Retrospectives such as Yes Yoko Ono (2000) and Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960, 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art (2015) traced the continuity of her instruction-based and participatory art. Her Wish Tree installations invite visitors worldwide to add handwritten hopes to living trees, an evolving archive of communal aspiration. She has received major honors, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2009, and she shared in the Grammy recognition when Double Fantasy won Album of the Year in 1981. Museums and universities continue to analyze her work for its prescient treatment of audience participation, feminist critique, and the politics of everyday gestures.

Legacy
Yoko Ono's legacy bridges the avant-garde and popular culture. In the studio and on stage she collaborated with musicians across generations, from experimental improvisers to her son Sean, with whom she revived the Plastic Ono Band. In galleries and public spaces she blurred the line between art object and social action, offering instructions that transform viewers into co-creators. The constellation of people around her, John Lennon and the former Beatles, Sean Ono Lennon, Kyoko Chan Cox, Anthony Cox, Toshi Ichiyanagi, friends in Fluxus like George Maciunas and Nam June Paik, composers such as La Monte Young and John Cage, and later collaborators across art and music, charts a life lived at the center of creative ferment. As a Japanese-born, New York, based artist, she helped define conceptual and performance art while insisting that imagination and participation could be instruments for peace.

Our collection contains 31 quotes who is written by Yoko, under the main topics: Motivational - Wisdom - Art - Music - Freedom.

Other people realated to Yoko: Angela Davis (Activist), Allen Klein (Businessman), David Geffen (Businessman), Hugh Hefner (Publisher), Thurston Moore (Musician), Ronnie Hawkins (Musician), Julian Lennon (Musician), Mark David Chapman (Criminal), Tony Levin (Musician)

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