Yoko Ono, the indefatigable artist and activist whose career continues to thrive decades after her famous relationship with now-deceased Beatle John Lennon, has turned 80 today, Feb. 18. Her milestone birthday reminds people around the world of her presence and continued, radical efforts as an agent for global peace and change.
The Los Angeles Times explains that, despite her common, and often unjust, association with The Beatles and their deterioration, Ono was already an established avant-garde artist in 1966, when she famously met The Beatles at London's Indica Gallery.
One of the artist's most famous performance art pieces is her "Bed-In For Peace," which she and John Lennon staged by simply staying in bed for a weeks and drawing the media's attention to this fact, thus gaining a platform for the broadcasting a message of peaceful protest against the Vietnam War.
Another example of the avant-garde artist's unique style came in the form of her famous "Cut Piece," in which she stoically sat in a loose garment, inviting members of an audience to walk up to her and cut a part of her clothing off. The performance effectively produced a relationship between the artist and an audience that spoke to a problematic paradigm between women and a larger culture of oppression. It claimed, and in many ways continues to claim, woman's image and personhood as belonging to a patriarchal regime. The artist has, in the decades since, continued to make a name for herself as an active public figure, mounting exhibitions and performances of her art, cultivating a massive twitter following, and protesting causes for the sake of world peace.
USA Today reports that on Friday, Feb. 22, the artist's retrospective exhibit, titled "Half-a-wind," will debut at the Schirn Kuntshalle in Frankfurt. Metro.uk described her recent birthday concert celebration, held at Berlin's Volksbühne venue, which sounds indisputably fabulous:
"The birthday lady wore stylish black, and was joined by a star-studded array of party guests, including her son and multi-instrumental collaborator Sean Ono Lennon, who led the Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band. Further musical turns came from REM frontman Michael Stipe, sibling duo Rufus and Martha Wainwright (who serenaded Yoko with 'happy birthday' in both English and German), and Berlin-based electro provocateur Peaches."
Yoko, a New York resident, has been protesting the use of hydraulic fracturing, also known as "fracking," a potentially environmentally and health harmful oil extraction process that may be introduced in the state of New York. In an effort to protest fracking, Ono founded Artists Against Fracking, an organization of almost 200 artists working to raise awareness about the dangers of the oil-extraction process through art-making and other forms of peaceful demonstration.
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