She became involved with New York City's downtown artists scene in the early 1960s, which included the Fluxus group, and became well known in 1969 when she married English musician John Lennon of the Beatles, with whom she would subsequently record as a duo in the Plastic Ono Band.

She funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan's Central Park,[6] the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland,[7] and the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, Japan (which closed in 2010).

"[20] After the war ended in 1945, Ono remained in Japan when her family moved to the United States and settled in Scarsdale, New York, an affluent town 25 miles (40 km) north of midtown Manhattan.

[28] She was introduced to more of Cage's unconventional neo-Dadaism first hand, and via his New York City protégés Allan Kaprow, Brecht, Mac Low, Al Hansen and the poet Dick Higgins.

[32] Ono's first contact with any member of the Beatles occurred when she visited Paul McCartney at his home in London to obtain a Lennon–McCartney song manuscript for a book John Cage was working on, Notations.

Her album included raw, harsh vocals, which bore a similarity with sounds in nature (especially those made by animals) and free jazz techniques used by wind and brass players.

Double Fantasy was released on November 17, 1980, and received tepid initial reviews, with much of the criticism centering on the idealization of Lennon and Ono's marriage and supposed domestic bliss.

[89] In 1984, a tribute album titled Every Man Has a Woman was released, featuring a selection of songs written by Ono performed by artists such as Elvis Costello, Roberta Flack, Eddie Money, Rosanne Cash, and Harry Nilsson.

Hosted by the actor Kevin Spacey and featuring Lou Reed, Cyndi Lauper and Nelly Furtado, it raised money for September 11 relief efforts[42] and aired on TNT and the WB.

Ono had great success with new versions of "Walking on Thin Ice", remixed by top DJs and dance artists including Pet Shop Boys,[111] Orange Factory,[112] Peter Rauhofer, and Danny Tenaglia.

During the Liverpool Biennial in 2004, Ono flooded the city with two images on banners, bags, stickers, postcards, flyers, posters and badges: one of a woman's naked breast, the other of the same model's vulva.

[122] On February 16, 2007, a deal was reached where extortion charges were dropped, and he pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny in the third degree, a felony, and was sentenced to the 60 days that he had already spent in jail.

[129] Two years later, on March 31, 2009, she went to the inauguration of the exhibition "Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko" to mark the 40th anniversary of the Lennon-Ono Bed-In at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Canada, from May 26 to June 2, 1969.

[132] Ono appeared onstage at Microsoft's June 1, 2009, E3 Expo press conference with Olivia Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr to promote the Beatles: Rock Band video game,[133] which was universally praised by critics.

Guests including Bette Midler, Paul Simon and his son Harper, and principal members of Sonic Youth and the Scissor Sisters interpreted her songs in their own styles.

[144] In April 2010, RCRD LBL made available free downloads of Junior Boys' mix of "I'm Not Getting Enough", a single originally released 10 years prior on Blueprint for a Sunrise.

[164] In February 2013, Ono accepted the Rainer Hildebrandt Medal at Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie Museum, awarded to her and Lennon for their lifetime of work for peace and human rights.

[168] In 2013, she and the Plastic Ono Band released the LP Take Me to the Land of Hell, which featured numerous guests including Yuka Honda, Cornelius, Hirotaka "Shimmy" Shimizu, mi-gu's Yuko Araki, Wilco's Nels Cline, Tune-Yards, Questlove, Lenny Kravitz, and Ad-Rock and Mike D of the Beastie Boys.

In June 2013, she curated the Meltdown festival in London, where she played two concerts, one with the Plastic Ono Band,[169] and the second on backing vocals during Siouxsie Sioux's rendition of "Walking on Thin Ice" at the Double Fantasy show.

On the strength of the singles "Hold Me" (Featuring Dave Audé) and "Walking on Thin Ice", the then-80-year-old beat Katy Perry, Robin Thicke and her friend Lady Gaga.

Other installation locations include London;[192] St. Louis;[193] Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Copenhagen;[194] the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California;[16] Japan;[195] Venice;[196] Dublin;[164] and, Miami at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in 2010.

These include an inscribed stone, a flag – which is flown on an annual basis on International Peace Day and a beacon of light installed on the dome roof of The Grand in Folkestone Leas.

As part of the exhibition Personal Structures, organised by Global Art Affairs, the installation was on view from June 1 through November 24, 2013, at the European Cultural Centre's Palazzo Bembo.

[208] Her circle of friends in the New York art world has included Kate Millett, Nam June Paik,[209] Dan Richter, Jonas Mekas,[210] Merce Cunningham,[211] Judith Malina,[212] Erica Abeel, Fred DeAsis, Peggy Guggenheim,[213] Betty Rollin, Shusaku Arakawa, Adrian Morris, Stefan Wolpe,[211] Keith Haring, and Andy Warhol[212] (she was one of the speakers at Warhol's 1987 funeral), as well as George Maciunas and La Monte Young.

YES refers to the title of a 1966 sculptural work by Yoko Ono, shown at Indica Gallery, London: viewers climb a ladder to read the word "yes", printed on a small canvas suspended from the ceiling.

[216] The exhibition's curator Alexandra Munroe wrote that "John Lennon got it, on his first meeting with Yoko: when he climbed the ladder to peer at the framed paper on the ceiling, he encountered the tiny word YES.

[241] After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, Ono paid for billboards to be put up in New York City and Los Angeles that bore the image of Lennon's blood-splashed spectacles.

Its program has since expanded to include writers, such as Michael Pollan and Alice Walker, activists such as Vandana Shiva and Pussy Riot, organizations such as New York's Center for Constitutional Rights, even an entire country (Iceland).

[244] On Valentine's Day 2003, which was the eve of the Iraqi invasion by the US and UK, Ono heard about a couple, Andrew and Christine Gale, who were holding a love-in protest in their tiny bedroom in Addingham, West Yorkshire.

[270] In 1995, after the Beatles released Lennon's "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", with demos provided by Ono, McCartney and his family collaborated with her and Sean to create the song "Hiroshima Sky Is Always Blue", which commemorates the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of that Japanese city.