At 93, Yoko Ono stands as one of the most influential and debated figures in modern art and music, Yoko Ono’s career spanning conceptual art, experimental sound, activism and pop history.
by Paul Cashmere
Yoko Ono turns 93 this week, marking more than seven decades at the forefront of avant garde art, radical music and global peace activism. Born in Tokyo on February 18, 1933, Yoko Ono’s life has traced the fault lines of the 20th and 21st centuries, from wartime Japan to the New York underground, from the inner circle of The Beatles to the global dance charts.
Raised in an aristocratic Japanese family with deep banking and samurai lineage, Ono’s early years were shaped by upheaval. She survived the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II and later moved between Japan and the United States, experiences that informed both her resilience and her worldview. By the early 1960s, she was embedded in New York’s downtown art scene, aligned with the Fluxus movement and figures such as John Cage and George Maciunas. Her loft at 112 Chambers Street became a crucible for experimental performance.
In 1964 she staged Cut Piece, an early performance work in which audience members were invited to cut away her clothing. The piece established Ono as a pioneer of conceptual and performance art, interrogating vulnerability, authorship and the gaze years before such conversations entered the mainstream.
Ono’s trajectory shifted irrevocably when she met John Lennon at London’s Indica Gallery in 1966. Their creative and romantic partnership became one of the most scrutinised relationships in pop culture. In 1969, the couple married and transformed their honeymoon into a Bed In For Peace, recording Give Peace A Chance during their Montreal protest.
Through the Plastic Ono Band, Ono pushed into experimental rock and free form vocalisation. Albums such as Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band and Fly in the early 1970s divided critics but later earned reassessment for their daring structure and vocal extremity. Her 1980 collaboration with Lennon, Double Fantasy, released weeks before his murder outside The Dakota in New York, won the Grammy Award for Album Of The Year and stands as a poignant document of renewal and domestic contentment.
After Lennon’s death on December 8, 1980, Ono assumed the dual role of grieving partner and custodian of a global legacy. She oversaw projects including the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park and Iceland’s Imagine Peace Tower. At the same time, she continued recording. Season Of Glass confronted the aftermath of tragedy with unflinching imagery, while Starpeace in 1985 offered a concept driven response to Cold War militarism.
Remarkably, Ono also became a fixture on the US dance charts. From Walking On Thin Ice through to Angel in 2014, she amassed twelve number one singles on Billboard’s Dance Club chart, leading Billboard to name her the 11th most successful dance club artist of all time in 2016. For an artist who began in loft happenings and conceptual scores, the club resurgence demonstrated both adaptability and an enduring appetite for risk.
Beyond music, Ono has maintained a sustained commitment to activism. She inaugurated the LennonOno Grant For Peace in 2002 and has supported causes spanning disaster relief in Japan and the Philippines to artists’ rights and environmental campaigns. In 2012 she received the Dr Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award in Berlin, affirming the political dimension that has always run through her work.
In recent years, Ono has stepped back from public life, with her son Sean acting as a representative for the Lennon estate. Yet her presence remains embedded in contemporary culture. Artists across genres, from punk to electronic, continue to cite her as a touchstone for fearless expression.
At 93, Yoko Ono’s story resists simplification. She is an experimental composer who scored dance floor hits, a conceptual artist who inhabited the centre of pop mythology, a peace activist whose slogans became global refrains. Few figures have traversed so many cultural arenas with such persistence. Her legacy is not confined to one discipline but dispersed across them, an ongoing conversation between art, music and the possibility of change.
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