Yoko Ono

Born in Tokyo on February 18, 1933, Yoko Ono grew into a life that crossed continents, languages, and art forms. She is a Japanese artist, musician, peace activist, filmmaker, and performance artist, but even that list feels too tidy for a figure who moved between the concert hall, the gallery, the street protest, and the pop charts. Her given name, Yoko, means “ocean child,” and her early life did have a wide horizon: Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, and back to Japan before she was a teenager.

Ono came from a wealthy and highly educated family. Her father, Eisuke Ono, was a banker and former classical pianist; her mother, Isoko, came from the Yasuda family. As a child, Ono studied piano and went with her mother to kabuki performances. She attended elite schools in Japan, including Gakushūin, and later became the first woman accepted into the philosophy program at Gakushuin University, though she left after two semesters. In 1952, she joined her family in New York and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied poetry, literature, and music composition.

The hardships of World War II also shaped her view of the world. Ono remained in Tokyo during the war and the fire-bombing of March 9, 1945, sheltered with family members in a bunker in the Azabu district. After the destruction of the bombings, starvation was widespread. Ono later said that this period helped form her “aggressive” attitude. Her father, who had been in French Indochina, was believed to be in a prisoner of war camp in China. These experiences placed violence, survival, and imagination close together in her memory.

In New York, Ono moved toward the experimental art and music of the city’s downtown scene. At Sarah Lawrence, she became fascinated by twelve-tone composers Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, and was introduced to the work of Edgar Varèse, John Cage, and Henry Cowell. In 1956, feeling “asphyxiated by conservative teachers,” she left Sarah Lawrence. That same year she married Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, who was studying at Juilliard. By the early 1960s, she was involved with New York City’s downtown artists scene, including the Fluxus group, and her work embraced performance art, filmmaking, and avant-garde music.

Ono became widely known beyond the contemporary art world in 1969, when she married John Lennon of the Beatles. Together they recorded as the Plastic Ono Band, and used their honeymoon for public protests against the Vietnam War with what they called a bed-in. Ono began her popular music career that same year and made a number of avant-garde albums in the 1970s. In 1980, she and Lennon released Double Fantasy, a chart-topping collaboration that won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. It came out three weeks before Lennon was murdered outside the couple’s apartment building, The Dakota, on December 8, 1980.

In the years that followed, Ono continued to work as an artist and activist. 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 later closed in 2010. She also gave to arts, peace, and disaster relief causes, inaugurated the LennonOno Grant for Peace in 2002, received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award in 2012, and co-founded Artists Against Fracking. Her words still carry the force of someone who treated art and life as one field of action: “You change the world by being yourself.”