Yoko Ono Born: Avant-Garde Artist and Peace Activist

Yoko Ono was already a well-established conceptual artist in New York and Tokyo when she met John Lennon in 1966 at a preview of her exhibition at the Indica Gallery in London. He climbed a ladder to read a small card on the ceiling. The word on it was "Yes." He came back the next day. Within two years the Beatles were breaking up and the public had decided she was the cause. The actual cause was four adults who'd been living inside an impossible situation for a decade. Born in Tokyo on February 18, 1933, to a wealthy banking family, Ono was the first woman admitted to the philosophy program at Gakushuin University. She moved to New York in the 1950s and became part of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists working in conceptual and performance art. Her work predated and influenced the conceptual art movement of the 1960s. Her "Instruction Paintings," which existed only as written directions for the viewer to execute in their imagination, anticipated Conceptual Art by several years. Her marriage to Lennon in 1969 produced some of the most creative artistic collaborations and some of the most ridiculed public spectacles of the era. Their "bed-ins" for peace, held in Amsterdam and Montreal, were dismissed as publicity stunts but generated enormous media coverage for the anti-war movement. The Plastic Ono Band albums they recorded together were raw, confrontational, and deeply personal. Lennon's album of the same name is considered one of the greatest rock records ever made, and Ono's influence on its emotional directness is widely acknowledged. After Lennon was murdered on December 8, 1980, she became the guardian of his legacy, managing the Beatles' catalog and curating his posthumous releases. Her own artistic output continued: museum retrospectives, installations, albums, and a sustained commitment to peace activism that has lasted over sixty years. She was blamed for breaking up the Beatles by a public that needed a simple story for a complicated event. The narrative stuck. She outlived it.