Yoko Ono was born in 1933 to mother Isoko Ono, the great-granddaughter of Zenjiro Yasuda of the Yasuda banking family, and to father Yeisuke Ono, a banker and one-time classical pianist. Two weeks before she was born, her father was transferred to San Francisco by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank. The rest of the family followed soon after and Yoko met her father when she was two. Her younger brother Keisuke was born in December 1936. In 1937, her father was transferred back to Japan and Ono was enrolled at Tokyo's Gakushuin (also known as the Peers School), one of the most exclusive schools in Japan.

In 1940, the family moved to New York City, where Ono's father was working. In 1941, her father was transferred to Hanoi and the family returned to Japan. Ono was then enrolled in Keimei Gakuen, an exclusive Christian primary school run by the Mitsui family. She remained in Tokyo through the great fire-bombing of March 9, 1945. During the fire-bombing, she was sheltered with other members of her family in a special bunker in the Azabu district of Tokyo, far from the heavy bombing. After the bombing, Ono went to the Karuizawa mountain resort with members of her family.

Ono has said that she and her family were forced to beg for food while pulling their belongings in a wheelbarrow; and it was during this period in her life that Ono says she developed her "aggressive" attitude and understanding of "outsider" status when children taunted her and her brother, who were once well-to-do. Other stories have her mother bringing a large number of goods with them to the countryside which they bartered for food. One famous anecdote has her mother bartering a German-made sewing machine for sixty kilograms of rice with which to feed the family. Her father remained in the city and, unbeknown to them, was believed to have been eventually incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp in China. In an interview by Democracy Now's Amy Goodman on October 16, 2007, Ono explained, "He was in French Indochina which is Vietnam actually... in Saigon. He was in a concentration camp."

By April 1946, the Peers' school was reopened and Ono was enrolled. The school, located near the imperial palace, had not been damaged by the war. She graduated in 1951 and was accepted into the philosophy program of Gakushuin University, the first woman ever to be accepted into that department of the exclusive university. However, after two semesters, she left the school.

Education and marriages

Ono's family moved to Scarsdale, New York after the war. She left Japan to rejoin the family and enrolled in nearby Sarah Lawrence College. While her parents approved of her college choice, they were dismayed at her lifestyle, and, according to Ono, chastised her for befriending people they considered to be "beneath" her. In spite of this, Ono loved meeting artists, poets and others who represented the "bohemian" freedom she longed for herself. Visiting galleries and art "happenings" in the city whetted her desire to publicly display her own artistic endeavors. La Monte Young, her first important contact in the New York art world, helped Ono start her career by using her Chambers Street loft in Tribeca as a performance space. At one performance, Ono set a painting on fire; fortunately John Cage had advised her to treat the paper with flame retardant.

In 1956, she married composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. They divorced in 1962 after living apart for several years. On November 28 that same year, Ono married an American named Anthony Cox. Cox was a jazz musician, film producer and art promoter. He had heard of Ono in New York and tracked her down to a mental institution in Japan, where her family had placed her following a suicide attempt. Ono had neglected to finalize her divorce from Ichiyanagi, so their marriage was annulled on March 1, 1963 and Cox and Ono married on June 6. Their daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, was born two months later on August 3, 1963.

The marriage quickly fell apart but the Coxes stayed together for the sake of their joint career. They performed at Tokyo's Sogetsu Hall with Ono lying atop a piano played by John Cage. Soon the Coxes returned to New York with Kyoko. In the early years of this marriage, Ono left most of Kyoko's parenting to Cox while she pursued her art full-time and Tony managed publicity. After she divorced Cox on February 2, 1969, Ono and Cox engaged in a bitter legal battle for custody of Kyoko, which resulted in Ono being awarded full custody. However, in 1971, Cox disappeared with eight-year-old Kyoko, in violation of the custody order. Cox subsequently became a Christian and raised Kyoko in a Christian group known as the Church of the Living Word (or "the Walk"). Cox left the group with Kyoko in 1977. Living an underground existence, Cox changed the girl's name to Rosemary. Cox and Kyoko sent Ono a sympathy message after Lennon's 1980 murder. Afterwards, the bitterness between the parents lessened slightly and Ono publicly announced in People Magazine that she would no longer seek out the now-adult Kyoko, but still wished to make contact with her. In 1994, Kyoko made contact with Ono and established a relationship.

Artwork

Wish Tree for Washington, D.C. by Yoko Ono. Live tree and mixed media, 2007.

Ono was a sometime member of Fluxus, a loose association of Dada-inspired avant-garde artists that developed in the early 1960s. Fluxus founder George Maciunas, a friend of Ono's during the 1960s, admired her work and promoted it with enthusiasm. One of Ono's well known examples is when she took a fly as her alter ego and was inspired by this for her work. Maciunas invited Ono to join the Fluxus group, but she declined because she wanted to remain an independent artist.New School, that would introduce her to the unconventional avant-garde, neo-Dadaism of John Cage and his protégés in New York City. John Cage was one of the most important influences on Ono's performance art.

Almost immediately after John Cage finished teaching at the New School for Social Research in the Summer of 1960, Ono was determined to rent a place to present her works along with works of other New York avant-garde artists. She eventually found a cheap loft in downtown Manhattan at 112 Chambers Street that she used as a studio and living space. Composer La Monte Young urged Ono to let him organize concerts in the loft, and Ono acquiesced. Both artists began organizing a series of events in Ono's loft, and both Young and Ono claimed to have been the primary curator of these events, but Ono claims to have been eventually pushed into a subsidiary role by Young. The Chambers Street series hosted some of Ono's earliest conceptual artwork including Painting to Be Stepped On, which was a scrap of canvas on the floor that became a completed artwork upon the accrual of footprints. Participants faced a moral dilemma presented by Ono that a work of art no longer needed to be mounted on a wall, inaccessible, but an irregular piece of canvas as low and dirty as to have to be completed by being stepped on.

Ono was an explorer of conceptual art and performance art. An example of her performance art is "Cut Piece" (this instance of performance art is also known as a "happening"), first performed in 1964 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. Cut Piece had one destructive verb as its instruction: "Cut." Ono executed the performance in Tokyo by walking on stage and casually kneeling on the floor in a draped garment. Audience members were requested to come on stage and begin cutting until she was naked. Cut Piece was one of Ono’s many opportunities to outwardly communicate her internal suffering through her art. Ono had originally been exposed to Jean-Paul Sartre's theories of existentialism in college, and in order to appease her own human suffering, Ono enlisted her viewers to complete her works of art in order to complete her identity as well. Besides a commentary on identity, Cut Piece was a commentary on the need for social unity and love. It was also a piece that touched on issues of gender and sexism as well as the greater, universal affliction of human suffering and loneliness. Ono performed this piece again in London and other venues, garnering drastically different attention depending on the audience. In Japan, the audience was shy and cautious. In London, the audience participators became zealous to get a piece of her clothing and became violent to the point where she had to be protected by security. An example of her conceptual art includes her book of instructions called Grapefruit. This book, first produced in 1964, includes surreal, Zen-like instructions that are to be completed in the mind of the reader, for example: "Hide and seek Piece: Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies." The book, an example of Heuristic art, was published several times, most widely distributed by Simon and Schuster in 1971, and reprinted by them again in 2000. Many of the scenarios in the book would be enacted as performance pieces throughout Ono's career and have formed the basis for her art exhibitions, including one highly publicized show at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York that was nearly closed by a fan riot.

In addition to conceptual art, Ono has also created participatory art, including her 1996 project entitled "Wish Tree" in Japan.

"Wish Piece by Yoko Ono (1996)
Make a wish
Write it down on a piece of paper
Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree
Ask your friends to do the same
Keep wishing
Until the branches are covered with wishes".

Ono was also an experimental filmmaker who made sixteen films between 1964 and 1972, and gained particular renown for a 1966 Fluxus film called simply No. 4, but often referred to as "Bottoms". The film consists of a series of close-ups of human buttocks as the subject walks on a treadmill. The screen is divided into four almost equal sections by the elements of the gluteal clefthorizontal gluteal crease. The soundtrack consists of interviews with those who are being filmed as well as those considering joining the project. In 1996, the watch manufacturing company Swatch produced a limited edition watch that commemorates this film. (Ono also acted in an obscure exploitation film in 1965, Satan's Bed.)

John Lennon once described her as "the world's most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does." Her circle of friends in the New York art world has included Kate Millett, Nam June Paik, Dan Richter, Jonas Mekas, Merce Cunningham, Judith Malina, Erica Abeel, Fred DeAsis, Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Rollin, Shusaku Arakawa, Adrian Morris, Stefan Wolpe, Keith Haring, and Andy Warhol, as well as Maciunas and Young.

In 2001, YES YOKO ONO, a forty-year retrospective of Ono's work, received the prestigious International Association of Art Critics USA Award for Best Museum Show Originating in New York City, considered one of the highest accolades in the museum profession. In 2002 Ono was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for work in assorted media. In 2005 she received a lifetime achievement award from the Japan Society of New York.

Ono received an honorary Doctorate of Laws from Liverpool University in 2001. In 2002, she was presented with the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Bard College.

In 2008, she showed a large retrospective exhibition, Between The Sky And My Head, at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK.

In 2009, she showed a selection of new and old work as part of her show "Anton's Memory" in Venice, Italy. She also received a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale in 2009.


Contributions from the associate members of IMMAGINE&POESIA to Yoko Ono's Wish Tree

Wish Tree, her installation in the Sculpture Garden - Museum of Modern Art, New York (since July 2010), has become very popular with contributions from all over the world.

Life with John Lennon

Ono first met John Lennon when he visited a preview of an exhibition of Ono's at the Indica Gallery in London on November 9, 1966. Lennon's first personal encounter with Ono involved her passing him a card that read simply "Breathe". However, according to the Japan Society press release for the "Y E S YOKO ONO" retrospective exhibition from 2000, the Ono work which Lennon saw at the Indica Gallery show in 1966 that awakened him to her was "Ceiling Painting," described as follows: "The viewer is invited to climb a white ladder, where at the top a magnifying glass, attached by a chain, hangs from a frame on the ceiling. The viewer uses the reading glass to discover a block letter "instruction" beneath the framed sheet of glass – it says "Y E S." It was through this work that Ono met her third husband and longtime collaborator, John Lennon."

Another work displayed a real apple with a card reading "APPLE." When John was told that the price of the apple was £200 (approximately £2300 or $4600 in 2007 money), he later reported that he thought "This is a joke, this is pretty funny". Another display was a white board with nails in it with a sign inviting visitors to hammer a nail into its surface. Since the show was not beginning until the following day, Ono refused to allow Lennon to hammer in a nail. The gallery owner whisked her away, saying, "Don't you know who that is? He's a millionaire!" Upon returning to John, she said he could hammer in a nail for five shillings. Lennon replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings if you let me hammer in an imaginary nail".

Lennon referred to Ono in many of his songs. While still a Beatle he wrote "The Ballad of John and Yoko", and he alluded to her indirectly in "Julia", a song dedicated to his mother, with the lyrics: "Ocean child calls me, so I sing a song of love" (The kanji 洋子 ("Yoko") means "ocean child").

Ono and Lennon collaborated on many albums, beginning in 1968 when Lennon was still a Beatle, with Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins, an album of experimental and difficult electronic music. That same year, the couple contributed an experimental piece to The White Album called "Revolution 9". Ono also contributed backing vocals (on "Birthday"), and one line of lead vocals (on "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill") to The White Album. Many of the couple's later albums were released under the name the Plastic Ono Band. The couple also appeared together at concerts. When Lennon was invited to play with Frank Zappa at the Fillmore on June 5, 1971, Ono joined in as well.

In 1969, the Plastic Ono Band's first album, Live Peace in Toronto 1969, was recorded during the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival. In addition to Lennon and Ono, this first incarnation of the group consisted of guitarist Eric Clapton, bass player Klaus Voormann, and drummer Alan White. The first half of their performance consisted of rock standards, and during the second half, Ono took the microphone and along with the band performed an avant garde set, ending with music that consisted mainly of feedback, while Ono screamed and sang.

In November 1968, Yoko miscarried a male child which they named John Ono Lennon II. Ono and Lennon married on March 20, 1969 in Gibraltar.


Lennon and Yoko recording "Give Peace a Chance".

Ono released her first solo album, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band in 1970, as a companion piece to Lennon's better-known John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. The two albums have almost identical covers: Ono's featured a photo of her leaning on Lennon, and Lennon's had a photo of him leaning on Ono. Her album included raw and quite harsh vocals that were possibly influenced by Japanese opera, but bear much in common with sounds in nature (especially those made by animals) and free jazz techniques used by wind and brass players. The performers included Ornette Coleman and other renowned free jazz performers. The personnel was supplemented by John Lennon, Ringo Starr and minor performers. Some songs consisted of wordless vocalizations, in a style that would influence Meredith Monk, and other musical artists who have used screams and vocal noise in lieu of words. The album peaked at #183 on the US charts.

In 1971, Ono released Fly – a double album. On this release Ono explored slightly more conventional psychedelic rock with tracks like "Midsummer New York" and "Mind Train", in addition to a number of Fluxus experiments. She also received minor airplay with the ballad "Mrs. Lennon". Perhaps the most famous track from the album is "Don't Worry, Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)", an ode to Ono's kidnapped daughter.

In 1971, while studying with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Majorca, Ono's second husband, Anthony Cox, accused Ono of abducting their daughter, Kyoko from his hotel. A large number of accusations were then made by both parents toward each other and the matter of custody. Cox eventually moved to Houston, Texas and converted to Evangelical Christianity with his new wife, who was originally from Houston. At the end of 1971, a custody hearing in Houston went against Cox. In violation of the order, he took Kyoko and disappeared.Ono then launched a search for her daughter with the aid of the police and private investigators. Ono wrote a song about her daughter, "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)", which appears on Lennon and Ono's album Live Peace In Toronto 1969 and her album Fly. Both versions feature Eric Clapton on guitar. Kyoko is also referenced on the first line of "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" when Yoko whispers "Happy Christmas Kyoko" followed by Lennon whispering "Happy Christmas Julian".

Both the press and the public were critical of her. She was blamed for the breakup of The Beatles and repeatedly criticized for her influence over Lennon and his music. Her experimental art was not popularly understood.

After the Beatles disbanded, Lennon and Ono cohabited in London and then in New York. Their relationship was very strained as Lennon faced near-certain deportation from the United States based on the British drug charges and Ono was separated from her daughter, who would have remained behind if Ono followed Lennon back to England. The couple separated in 1973 and the two began living separate lives, Ono pursuing her career in New York and Lennon living in Los Angeles with personal assistant May Pang in a period commonly referred to as his "lost weekend".

In 1975, the couple reconciled. Their son, Sean, was born on Lennon's 35th birthday, October 9, 1975. After Sean's birth, the couple lived in relative seclusion at the Dakota in New York. John Lennon retired from music to become a househusband caring for their child, until shortly before his murder in December 1980, which Ono witnessed at close range. Ono has stated that the couple were thinking about going out to dinner (after spending several hours in a recording studio), but were returning to their apartment instead, because John wanted to see Sean before he was put to bed. Following the murder, she went into complete seclusion for an extended period.

Following Lennon's murder, Cox and Kyoko sent a message of sympathy to Ono but did not reveal their location. Ono later printed an open letter to Kyoko saying how she missed her but that she would cease her attempts to find her. Kyoko would later appear on the 1987 title track of American English by the British pop band Wax.

Memorials


Yoko Ono delivering flowers to Lennon's memorial in 2005.

Ono funded the construction and maintenance of the Strawberry Fields memorial in New York City's Central Park, across from where they lived and Lennon died. It was officially dedicated on October 9, 1985, what would have been his 45th birthday. In 2000, she founded the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, Saitama, Japan. On October 9, 2007, Ono dedicated a new memorial called the Imagine Peace Tower, located on the island of Viðey, 1 km outside the Skarfabakki harbour in Reykjavík in Iceland. Each year, between October 9 and December 8, it projects a vertical beam of light high into the sky. In 2009, Ono created an exhibit called John Lennon: THE NEW YORK CITY YEARS for the NYC Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex. The exhibit uses music, photographs and personal items to depict Lennon's life in New York. A portion of the cost of each ticket to the exhibition is donated to Spirit Foundation, a charitable foundation set up by Lennon and Ono.

In 2005, Ono said, "People like to picture Paul and me in a boxing ring, feuding all the time, otherwise it's not exciting or interesting for them. People need light-hearted topics like me and Paul fighting to escape all the horror of the world, but it's not true anymore." However, they have publicly disagreed on several issues.

In late 1965, Ono was in London compiling original musical scores for a book John Cage was working on. She met McCartney who declined to give her any of his own manuscripts for the book. John Lennon later gave Ono the original handwritten lyrics to "The Word", which were subsequently reproduced in Cage's book Notations published in 1969.

Writing credit on Beatles songs was another issue. While the group was together, every song written by Lennon or McCartney was credited as Lennon-McCartney regardless of whether the song was a collaboration or written solely by one of the two (except for those appearing on their first album, Please Please Me, which credited the songs to McCartney-Lennon). In 1976, McCartney released a live album called Wings Over America which credited the five Beatles tracks he included as P. McCartney-J. Lennon compositions. Neither Lennon nor Ono objected. After Lennon's death, McCartney once again attempted to change the order to "McCartney-Lennon" for songs such as "Yesterday" that were solely or predominantly written by him, but Ono would not allow it, saying she felt this broke an agreement that the two had made while Lennon was still alive. However, McCartney argued that such an agreement never existed. The two other Beatles agreed that the credits should remain as they always had been and McCartney withdrew his request. On the 1998 John Lennon anthology, Lennon Legend, the composer credit of "Give Peace a Chance" was changed to "John Lennon" from its original composing credit of Lennon-McCartney. Although the song was written by Lennon during his tenure with the Beatles it was both written and recorded without the help of the band and released as Lennon's first independent single under the "Plastic Ono Band" moniker. Lennon subsequently expressed regret that he had not given co-writing credit to Ono instead, who actually helped him write the song. In 2002, McCartney released another live album, Back in the U.S. Live 2002, and the 19 Beatles' songs included are described as "written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon".

In 1995, after the Beatles released Lennon's "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" with demos provided by Ono, McCartney and his family collaborated with her and Sean Lennon to create the song "Hiroshima Sky is Always Blue", which commemorates the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of that Japanese city. Of Ono, McCartney stated: "I thought she was a cold woman. I think that's wrong ... she's just the opposite ... I think she's just more determined than most people to be herself."

In 1997, Ono compared Lennon to Mozart while McCartney, she said, more closely resembled his less-talented rival Salieri. This remark infuriated Linda McCartney, who was battling breast cancer at the time. When she died less than a year later, McCartney pointedly did not invite Ono to a New York memorial service for her.

Accepting an award at the 2005 Q Awards, Ono mentioned that Lennon had once felt insecure about his songwriting, and asked her why other musicians "always cover Paul's songs, and never mine". Ono had responded, "You're a good songwriter; it's not June with spoon that you write. You're a good singer, and most musicians are probably a little bit nervous about covering your songs". McCartney responded by saying, "I don’t take any notice of her. She’s John’s wife so I have to respect her for that, but I don’t think she’s the brightest of buttons. She’s said some particularly daft things in her time. Her life is dedicated to putting me down but I attempt very strongly not to put her down." Ono later issued a statement claiming she did not mean any offense, as her comment was an attempt to console her husband, not attack McCartney; she went on to insist that she respected McCartney and that it was the press who had taken her comments out of context. " At the June 2006 Las Vegas premiere of Cirque du Soleil's Beatles performance "Love", pictures were taken of her and Paul hugging. They appeared again together in July 2007 for the show's first anniversary.

Relationship with Cynthia Lennon

Ono's relationship with John Lennon's first wife, Cynthia Lennon remains strained. In her 2006 biography, John, (London: Hodder; U.S.: Crown Publishing) Cynthia Lennon portrays Ono as a selfish, spiteful woman. In the book, she describes learning about Ono's control over John (who referred to Ono as "mother") in the period in the mid-1970s when Ono chose May Pang to be John's companion. Cynthia hypothesizes that John had a "mother complex," allowing himself to be dominated by strong women and draws a parallel between his relationship with Ono and that with his domineering aunt Mimi Smith in childhood.