Yoko Ono: "Music of the Mind" (until 1st September, at the Tate Modern), is the U.K.’s largest exhibition of the artist’s work and forms part of a trend, brewing since the late 1990s, of vindication of a woman long vilified as the witch-like destroyer of the Beatles. Peter Jackson’s 2021 docuseries, Get Back, coincided with this broader move questioning the ways that Asian women have been depicted. (The first Yoko Ono album I ever owned was a 2007 collection of her songs remixed and reimagined by young DJs.) Ono was the first female philosophy student at Tokyo’s Gakushuin University, then studied poetry and musical composition at Sarah Lawrence, after moving to New York in 1953. Years before the Fab Four debuted on Ed Sullivan, she was a leading figure in Manhattan’s burgeoning avant-garde art scene, with a debut exhibition in July 1961 at AG Gallery, run by seminal Fluxus artist George Maciunas and gallerist Almus Salcius.

AFTER DECADES OF creating subversive art and music, Yoko Ono will receive a lifetime achievement award. MacDowell, an organization that offers artists residencies, will honor the artist with its Edward MacDowell Medal at an event in Peterborough, New Hampshire, this summer. [...] “It’s an incredible honor that my mother, Yoko Ono, will be awarded the MacDowell Medal,” her son Sean Ono Lennon, who recently won an Oscar for an animated short about his parents, said in a statement. “The history and list of past recipients is truly remarkable. It makes me very proud to see her art appreciated and celebrated in this way.”

As “Yoko Ono : Music of the Mind” (Tate Modern, until 21 September) makes clear, said history is long overdue for revision where Yoko is concerned. Her story is “more subtle, more interesting, and more nuanced than has ever really been allowed,” Sean—himself a musician—emphasizes in his Transatlantic tones now, “and this exhibition feels, in a lot of ways, like a correction of the accepted narrative about her life, her work.” If MoMA’s “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971” gave New Yorkers a chance to change their minds about Ono and her oeuvre in 2015, the London-based retrospective does the same for a country that spawned both the Fab Four and some of the most shockingly vitriolic coverage of “The Smart One” and “his wife.” Curated by Juliet Bingham and spanning seven decades of work, it’s a testament to the fact that Ono’s is a talent so towering, a character so cool, that to contemplate either in the shadow of Beatlemania is to do both her and yourself a disservice.

The exhibition "Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind" ( Tate Modern, until September 2024)—the title is derived from her concerts in London and Liverpool, in 1966 and 1967—opens with works that seem to rely on Ono’s central presence and laconic persona. In Eye Blink (Fluxfilm No. 15) (1966), the artist’s left eye shuts and opens in a black-and-white, slow-motion close-up. There is just enough facial information to recognise her and imagine you are looking, for two minutes and 40 seconds, at something akin to Andy Warhol’s Screen Test film portraits, begun a couple of years earlier. A staring contest, in other words, between subject and medium, a test of self-possession and charisma.

Too often reduced to being merely a muse to his career, it’s clear that Yoko Ono was, in fact, the master, doubtlessly inspiring The Beatles and Lennon’s deeper dive into experimentation as she brought her avant-garde experience and vastly creative brain into their realm. [...] Throughout "Music Of The Mind" (until 1st september, 2024), the Tate turns those voices down to turn the sound of Ono’s own remarkable and expansive career up. [...] Tate’s efforts feel like a vital redirection and rebalancing of Ono’s history. As they highlight her collaborations with the likes of John Cage, they spotlight her place in the exciting sect of avant-garde artists who used sound as a canvas.

As a blockbuster Tate Modern exhibition on her opens, we celebrate Yoko Ono and explore why she's never been given a fair trial “Yoko Ono is such a versatile artist and has worked in so many different ways to convey her message,” says Juliet Bingham, co-curator of Tate Modern’s "Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind" (15 February - 2 November at Tate Modern).“One of the things the show tries to do is honour all the different strands of her métier – participatory work, her conceptual pieces and art designed to stimulate the imagination of the viewer. Yoko upended the relationship between the artist and the audience.”

From February 15th to September 1st, 2024, Tate Modern presents UK’s largest exhibition celebrating the influential work of artist and activist Yoko Ono, spanning seven decades of her multidisciplinary practice. Titled YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND, the show features over 200 works, including installations, films, music, and photography, highlighting Ono’s radical approach to language, art, and participation. Ono’s art revolves around ideas expressed in poetic, humorous, and profound ways. The exhibition delves into her role in experimental avant-garde circles in New York and Tokyo, focusing on her ‘instruction pieces,’ which encourage visitors to imagine, experience, or complete the work.

Now 90, Yoko Ono is still at it, though not making much art any more. And although many of Ono’s works were first originated as ideas and notes she wrote during the 1950s and 60s, I am sure her retrospective will be popular, not so much for students of fluxus and early performance and conceptual art, so much as for the opportunity to interact. Wanting to be more than mute spectators, audiences now want to do more than pay respect to history, to the blue chip and the elevated. They want to feel included and to have agency. From the start, this was something Ono acknowledged and encouraged. Her exhibition "Music of the Mind" is now at Tate Modern, London, from 15 February to 1 September.

Opening a few days before Ono’s 91st birthday, “Music of the Mind” (Tate Modern, London, 15 February-1 September 2024) will range back to Ono’s early career in the 1960s—well before she entered Lennon’s orbit—exploring a period of participatory work that included the infamous Cut Piece, in which Ono’s clothes were snipped off by her audience, and Bag Piece, in which she performed inside a large black bag. The Tate show’s co-curator Juliet Bingham stresses that a key aim is to highlight that Ono was, artistically speaking, fully formed by the time she crossed paths with The Beatles.

The show "Music of the Mind" (15 February 2024 - 01 September 2024, Tate Modern), explores some of Yoko Ono’s most talked about artworks and performances, from Cut Piece (1964), where people were invited to cut off her clothing, to her banned Film No.4 (Bottoms) (1966-67), which she created as a ‘petition for peace’. Alongside her early performances, works on paper, objects, and music, audiences will discover a selection of her activist projects such as PEACE is POWER and Wish Tree, where visitors can contribute personal wishes for peace.

The Plastic Ono Band was first conceived of as a “Fluxus” band that emphasised the means of producing art over the finished product. Breaking out of many of the trademarks that the Beatles first curated on the music scene, the Plastic Ono Band was formed in 1968 as a multi-media art project more than a typical rock band. [...] The band performed in Europe at the UNICEF benefit concert at the Lyceum Ballroom in London in 1969. The gig was titled “Peace for Christmas” and remained the only time the band – with Lennon and Ono together – would perform in Europe. In its various forms, the Plastic Ono Band would continue to record music up and perform occasionally until the couple split in the mid-70s. Since 2009, Ono has revived the band with her and Lennon’s son Sean and performed worldwide.