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Yoko Ono Biography

(1933–)

Related Works

Discography
1968 Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins
1969 Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions

1969 Wedding Album
1969 Live Peace in Toronto
1970 Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band
1971 Fly
1972 Sometime in New York City
1973 Approximately Infinite Universe
1973 Feeling the Space
1973 Welcome: The Many Sides of Yoko Ono
1974/97 A Story
1980 Double Fantasy
1981 Season of Glass
1982 It's Alright (I See Rainbows)
1984 Milk and Honey
1984 Every Man Has a Woman
1985 Starpeace
1992 Onobox
1992 Walking On Thin Ice
1995 Rising
1995 New York Rock
1996 Rising Mixes
2001 Blueprint For A SunriseMusicals
New York Rock (play by Don Restro)
Hiroshima

» More

Related People

Related Sites

An Unofficial Yoko Ono Resource

Multimedia artist Yoko Ono was born February 18, 1933, in Tokyo, Japan, the eldest of three children born to Eisuke and Isoko, a wealthy aristocratic family.

Her father, who worked for the Yokohama Specie Bank, was transferred to San Francisco two weeks before she was born. The rest of the family soon followed.

Her father was transferred back to Japan in 1937, and she enrolled at the elite Peers’ School in Tokyo.

In 1940, the family moved to New York, then back to Japan in 1941 when her father was transferred to Hanoi on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Ono remained in Tokyo through World War II, including the great-fire bombing of 1945.

At age 18, Ono moved with her parents to Scarsdale, New York. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College, but left to elope with her first husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi.

Settling in Greenwich Village, she developed her interest in art and also began writing poetry. Considered too radical by many, her work was not well received but she gained recognition after working with American jazz musician/film producer Anthony Cox, who later became her second husband.

Cox financed and helped coordinate her "interactive conceptual events" in the early 1960s. Yoko's work often demands the viewers' participation and forces them to get involved. Her most famous piece was the "cut piece" staged in 1964, where the audience was invited to cut off pieces of her clothing until she was naked, an abstract commentary on discarding materialism.