Yoko

Ono grew up in Tokyo and also spent several years in New York City. She studied at Gakushuin University, but withdrew from her course after two years and moved to New York in 1953 to live with her family. She spent some time at Sarah Lawrence College and then became involved in New York City's downtown artists scene, which included the Fluxus group. She first met Lennon in 1966 at her own art exhibition in London, and they became a couple in 1968 and wed the following year. With their performance Bed-Ins for Peace in Amsterdam and Montreal in 1969, Ono and Lennon famously used their honeymoon at the Hilton Amsterdam as a stage for public protests against the Vietnam War. The feminist themes of her music have influenced musicians as diverse as the B-52s and Meredith Monk. She achieved commercial and critical acclaim in 1980 with the chart-topping album Double Fantasy, a collaboration with Lennon that was released three weeks before his murder.

A classically trained vocalist and pianist, Ono worked with John Cage and LaMonte Young in the early '60s and had connections to the Fluxus art movement. When she and Lennon began making music together in the late '60s, she challenged him to become a more experimental and autobiographical artist. Her music blended rock, jazz, and the avant-garde with the same boundary-breaking attitude of her work in other art forms, ranging from the free jazz influences of 1970's Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band to 1971's more structured Fly to the subversively feminist use of glam, funk, and pop on 1973's Feeling the Space and Approximately Infinite Universe. Her '80s output spanned 1981's Season of Glass, her brilliantly harrowing response to Lennon's murder, to 1985's idealistic Starpeace. During the '80s and '90s, the importance of Ono's work as a forward-thinking musician was increasingly realized. Artists such as Elvis Costello, the B-52's, and Sonic Youth covered her songs, while 1992's Onobox made her music more widely available. In later years, Ono refused to rest on her laurels, and 1995's Rising was just as confrontational as her earlier music. Along with her success as a dance artist in the 2000s and 2010s, she collaborated with younger musicians such as tUnE-yArDs, ?uestlove, and her son Sean Lennon on albums like Take Me to the Land of Hell. Ono also continued to be a tireless advocate for peace and the environment, and helped keep Lennon's memory alive with memorials including Strawberry Fields and the Imagine Peace Tower.