You are The Plastic Ono Band

Not all rumours are true.

Growing up, the general consensus was that Yoko Ono was the woman who had interrupted one of the greatest musical movements. For many years, the press and the public published scathing commentary on Ono’s public and private decisions. She was criticized for influencing Lennon’s musical choices and her experimental artwork was derided by the greater public.

While rumoured to have broken up the Beatles, Ono isn’t just a heart-breaker, and Lennon’s wife, but a renowned artist on her own, with her own band and groundbreaking art practice.

Since her retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1989, and a recent retrospective “One Woman Show” at MoMa in September 2015, public opinion of Ono has broadened into an appreciation of the contributions her avant-garde artwork has made towards feminism, human rights, and world peace.

The young artist poses with her sculpture entitled Apple, 1966. Vanity Fair declares this piece as a must-see at Yoko Ono’s MoMa show. The apple is a real Granny Smith that, over time, decays on its chipped glass pedestal. Museum staff with periodically replace the old, rotten apple with a newer version.

Instagram spoof of her famous Cut Piece performance where audience members were invited to cut her clothes away with large scissors. Her experimental artwork is often participatory, dealing with issues of politics, space, sex, perspective, and vulnerability, amongst other themes.

Born in 1933 at her family’s ancestral estate in Tokyo and raised in Japan, Ono studied for a time at Sarah Lawrence College and got her start with the Fluxus conceptual art movement in New York City. Later, in 1969, Ono and Lennon started The Plastic Ono Band, collaborating on experimental music. The band dispersed around 1974, until its recent revival as the Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band, headed by the matriarch herself, and her son Sean Lennon.

Rolling Stone interviewed Ono on her recent music video, entitled Bad Dancer. The video speaks to the way her work always has encouraged a dialogue with the audience. The album’s director, Ben Dickinson, remarks on the “simplicity of her just dancing with people.”