Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono is a leading experimental and avant-garde artist. She has been associated with Conceptual art, performance, Fluxus and happenings of the 1960s, one of very few women to have participated in these movements, but above all she has been a pioneer who has questioned the notion of art and the art object and has broken down the traditional boundaries between branches of art. Through her work she has created a new kind of relationship with spectators, inviting them to play an active part in its making. She also brings together two worlds – Oriental and Western culture – which extend and strengthen each other in continuous innovation.

As a pioneering conceptual artist, performance artist, film-maker, poet, musician, writer, peace and feminist activist for over five decades, Yoko Ono has influenced several generations of artists, musicians and cultural workers across the globe. Throughout her career, she has explored an incredible range of media, coining new kinds of artistic genres – most notably with her instruction pieces, which she began making in the 1950s and continues to devise today. By constantly pushing the boundaries of various media, she prevents the categorization of her artistic practice.

Exhibitions and retrospectives of her artwork have been presented in numerous museums and kunsthalles around the world. She has received many prestigious awards throughout her career including the Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale (2009), the 8th Hiroshima Art Prize (2011), and the Oscar Kokoschka prize (2012), Austria’s highest award for applied contemporary art.

Yoko Ono is well known for her peace initiative, first with her husband John Lennon, Bed-In for Peace and War Is Over (If You Want It), and more recently with her Imagine Peace tower in Iceland and participatory Wish Trees throughout the world. In 2002 she inaugurated a biennial LennonOno Grant for Peace.