Yoko Ono – #AtoZChallenge

Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, filmmaker, and peace activist. A prominent figure in the Fluxus movement and avant-garde art scene, Ono’s work blends visual and performing arts to explore themes of feminism, violence, joy, and human resilience. Classically trained in piano and voice, Ono was the first woman admitted to Gakushūin University’s philosophy program in Tokyo.

As Lennon’s widow, Ono works to preserve his legacy. 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 closed in 2010)
Her first artworks were the menus she dreamed up during the deprivations of World War II. Ono witnessed the firebombing of Tokyo and was evacuated with her siblings to the countryside. There were food shortages, so she and her brother would look up at the sky and construct menus. She considers this her first work of art, in the sense of imagining a different world. Her wartime experiences – from being evacuated to the atomic bomb being dropped on Japan – were foundational. They relate to her work around healing, like the smashed vase the audience is asked to put back together in Mend Piece (1966), her early performances in darkness, and the campaigning for peace which has been a cornerstone of her practice.
Ono and Lennon were cat people. The couple’s cats included Salt, who was white, and Pepper, who was black, as well as Major and Minor and Gertrude and Alice, presumably named after the modernist writer Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas.
The artwork for one of the albums she created with Lennon was censored. The couple posed naked for the front cover of Unfinished Music No 1: Two Virgins (1968), with the verso showing them naked from behind. The album had to be sold covered with a brown paper bag.