Yoko Ono's Multifaceted Artistic Legacy

The wild fandom surrounding The Beatles may have etched Yoko Ono’s name into pop culture history, but Ono has long been a barrier-breaking innovator in her own right. John Lennon once called her “the world’s most famous unknown artist,” adding that “everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.” 

Ono describes herself as an artist, musician and activist. In each field, the nonagenarian has been a disruptor, shaking up the avant-garde art scene with thought-provoking multimedia exhibitions, defying and inventing new musical genres (even penning an off-Broadway musical) and staying true to her vision for imagining peace around the world.

In fact, she was already a well-respected artist preparing to showcase her work in a solo exhibition at London’s Indica Gallery on the fateful day one of the Fab Four stopped by in 1966. She and Lennon instantly bonded over the intrigue of her art installation inviting viewers to “Hammer a Nail In.”

While her story instantly got swept up in Beatlemania, Ono has also been “increasingly seen by art historians as one of the most important pioneers of conceptualism and performance art,” historical musicologist and New York University professor Brigid Cohen says, adding she sees Ono as “one of the most original musical thinkers and experimenters of the late 20th century.”

Ono herself admitted that she was never one to stay within the lines. The “boundaries that were set up in this society and the prescribed forms of art were something that I ignored from the beginning," she told The Japan Times in 2009.

Here, we highlight just a handful of Ono’s accomplishments. 

“Having grown up in World War II-era Tokyo, and endured the 1945 Tokyo firebombings and starvation conditions as an internal refugee in the countryside outside Nagano, Ono came to realize that her imagination was the only constant in her life,” Cohen says. Tokyo’s Gakushuin University offered Ono the chance to delve deeper into life’s questions—and her choice of studies showcased her independent mindset. She is often cited as their first female philosophy student.

"In entering the program, Ono rebelled against the so-called ryosi kenbo (“good wife, wise mother”) code of women’s citizenship in Japan,” Cohen adds. After studying for two semesters, Ono moved to New York to continue her education at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

Cultivating her craft in New York City during the late 1950s, Ono made her solo exhibition debut in 1961 with "Painting to Be Stepped On," a canvas on the floor with instructions for viewers to walk right onto it. Such audience involvement became central to her art, best showcased in "Cut Piece" (1964), in which she invited audience members to cut away pieces of her clothing as she sat on a stage. “It represents her concern with giving and taking, and with questions of peace and aggression,” Cohen explains.

“Many features of Ono’s early work became influential, both large- and small-scale,” Cohen says, citing the example of lighting a match during performances, which other artists like Allan Kaprow later adopted.

Though her style was linked to the 1960s and 1970s conceptual art movement of Fluxus, she opted not to officially join the experimental collective. “Ono was allergic to any kind of groupthink, likely in reaction to the fascist movements of her childhood in wartime Japan,” Cohen says. “She didn’t want to position herself in the center of any group—even a far-out group like Fluxus.”

Ono experimented with analogue tapes in the early to mid-1960s by manipulating the tape itself. She created an early form of electronic music, set to art performances and film. She also pulled from a wide range of niche genres like kabuki (highly stylized Japanese performance art), Austro-German Expressionist opera and free jazz. Ono “developed highly original vocal techniques that were central to her famous ‘16-track vocal style,’” Cohen says. 

She also notes that Ono “anticipated punk” with those techniques, especially apparent in her single “Why” (1970). She later became a part of the New Wave movement with hit songs like “Walking on Thin Ice” (1981), which gave the musician her first Billboard's Hot Dance Club Play No. 1 placement decades later in 2003. “She became highly involved in EDM [electronic dance music] all through her later years,” Cohen says. “She acted as a fairy godmother to generations of young artists working in art rock, pop, experimental hip-hop, electronic music, queer performance art and so on.” 

Her fascination with the concept of imagination also inspired her husband’s 1971 Billboard No. 3 hit “Imagine,” which earned her a co-writing credit 46 years later in 2017. Her more widely known musical collaborations were with Lennon through the Plastic Ono Band, which started in 1968 and was revived with son Sean Lennon in 2009.

Ono’s work has always been rooted in community, and she enjoyed bringing together colleagues. Ono helped popularize the practice of loft concerts by hosting music series in her Manhattan home on Chambers Street in the 1960s.

“At the time it hadn’t been usual to host concerts in artists’ studio-lofts, but after Ono it became a new norm,” Cohen says. As a transnationalist artist, she was dedicated to promoting experimental creators across continents—and one of the first to connect the art scene between Japan and New York, even helping to coordinate a 1962 Japan tour for avant-garde musician John Cage.

Ono's childhood love of haiku developed into poetry during her college years, and was peppered throughout her instructional art. Her piece "Touch Poem for Group of People" (1963) urges viewers to reach out and touch one another, and some consider her 1964 book Grapefruit a work of poetry as well. The Poetry Foundation spotlighted the book in a 2019 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Art director Fred Sasaki called it “poetry as a way of thinking, looking and being.”

Continuing her lyrical work, Ono published her 20-word poem “Mother Earth” in the July/August 2018 issue of the foundation’s Poetry magazine.

Ono's 1961 debut concert at Carnegie Recital Hall featured "AOS–to David Tudor," a self-described five-part “opera" that viscerally addressed the “blue chaos of war,” as Cohen notes. It was informed by Ono's childhood experiences during World War II Tokyo firebombings.

Her most famous peace campaign was her Bed-In for Peace with Lennon, when they turned their 1969 honeymoon in Amsterdam and Montreal into a hotel sit-in. 

Ono’s most wide-reaching project to date is Wish Tree. “As a child in Japan, I used to go to a temple and write out a wish on a piece of thin paper and tie it around the branch of a tree,” she said, noting that the knots looked like white flowers blossoming from a distance. She invites visitors to write their own hopes on paper made of pulp. Those papers are then buried at the base of the Imagine Peace Tower, which has lit up Reykjavik, Iceland, since 2007.

Throughout her life, Ono has championed human rights, advocating for women, children and the LGBTQ+ community. Much of her philanthropy has been through the Spirit Foundation, which she founded with Lennon in 1978. “When I make money, I put it in there,” Ono told Samaritan Magazine in 2011.

The nonprofit has supported education initiatives that have built more than 100 schools in Africa, Asia and South America. It has also partnered with dozens of global charities that Ono herself handpicks, ranging from Second Harvest and Why Hunger in the United States to National Holocaust Memorial Day Trust in London.