OCTOBER – YOKO ONO
Yoko
Ono is a visual artist, a conceptual artist, a performance artist, a
filmmaker, a musician, a composer, and a political activist. She is also
the widow of John Lennon, with whom she was working in a recording
studio on the day of his death, December 8, 1980. The connection to her
husband has made Ono perhaps the most well-known living avant-garde
artist, although she was an influential figure well before she met him,
in 1966. The 'events' she presented in her loft on Chambers Street in
New York in the very early 1960s were important to the development of
experimental music, art, and dance. Ono had her first solo exhibition of
paintings and drawings in 1961, in a gallery directed by George
Maciunas, the founder of the Fluxus movement. Her first solo concert
took place in the Carnegie Recital Hall in New York later that year. In
1964, she self-published Grapefruit, a book of 'instructions' for the
implementation or conceptualization of her work, in an edition of 500
copies. Grapefruit has been expanded and reprinted many times and
translated into several languages.
Ono's most well-known performance
pieces are probably 'Cut Piece' (1964), in which she knelt on a stage
and invited the audience to cut off her clothes with a pair of tailor's
shears, and the 'Bed-In for Peace' (1969) that she and Lennon first held
in a hotel in Amsterdam in lieu of a honeymoon. After Lennon's death,
Ono devoted herself increasingly to music, integrating an
improvisational technique and distinct vocal style (shrieks, groans, and
whispers as well as melodious phrasing) into popular music. In 2009,
she and her son, Sean Lennon, revived the Plastic Ono Band, which had
been formed originally in the late Sixties. Ono was awarded the Golden
Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale that year. In 2015,
a retrospective of her early work, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,
was presented by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her many
philanthropic activities include the biennial LennonOno Grant for Peace,
support for organizations such as Amnesty International and UNICEF, and
funding for schools in impoverished countries.
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