Yoko Ono is best known as the wife of John Lennon from the Beatles. She comes from a prestigious Japanese family which had almost as much power and money as the imperial family. She grew up briefly in San Francisco because her father was transferred there for business. She returned to Japan when she was 5 and enrolled at the Tokyo Gakushuin University for the elite. She was in Japan during the fire bombs of 1945 and survived. She was the first woman ever to be accepted into the Philosophy Department at the university when she was of age, but she never finisehd her schooling. 

Ono returned to America soon after. In terms of her work, she was involved with the art group Fluxus, a group of avant-garde artists. However she soon left the group because she wanted to stay an independent artist, and didn’t fit well with all of Fluxus’ standings. Fluxus was known for their blending of media and “noise music,” which Ono was briefly a part of. Ono’s fate, however, was to be a conceptual and performance artist, and one of her most famous works is Grapefruit, a post-modern book filled with impossible and intangible instructions. 

One was also one of the first people to broaden the concept of art to go beyond something that is framed. One of these include her work Painting to be Stepped On, which was basically a balnk canvas which became “art” as people stapped on it and left footprints behind.