Explore the multidisciplinary career of trailblazing artist Yoko Ono and her enduring legacy of arts activism for peace and creativity in this two-day symposium, presented in tandem with Wish Tree. This convening assembles a host of scholars, artists, writers, and activists for a series of panels and performances that explore and highlight Ono’s message and highlight Ono’s influence and impact on the art world and the world at-large.
Schedule
Subject to change. Additional panels may be announced.
Saturday, February 15
1:00pm–2:00pm
Kindred Spirits: Yoko Ono and Toshi Ichiyanagi
Veterans Room
Asia Society Museum Director Yasufumi Nakamori traces the partnership between Yoko Ono and the Julliard-trained Japanese composer and pianist Toshi Ichiyanagi from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. It also touches on her collaborations with other Japanese creators including the artist collective Hi Red Center (Genpei Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Jiro Takamatsu) and filmmaker Takahiko Iimura in the 1960s.
The Musical Vocation of Yoko Ono
Board of Officers Room
From the earliest days of her career, Yoko Ono enlisted musical terms to designate multimedia performances that audiences would not intuitively recognize as musical. Ono’s early life would in fact have predisposed her to see “music”—and “music drama” in particular—as a privileged space for working through vexed political and philosophical problems. Drawing on archives, oral history, and close interpretation of Ono’s words, sounds, and actions, NYU historical musicologist Brigid Cohen‘s talk rethinks the musical dimension of Ono’s artistic vocation—vocation as calling, as career, as persona, and as personal and political voice.
2:15pm–3:15pm
Peace is Power: Yoko Ono’s Peace Activism in Art
Veterans Room
From Yoko Ono’s earliest pieces, she works in messages of healing and non-violence; these messages are the seeds that grow into her full-blown peace activist campaigns in the 1960s. This talk follows the thread running through Ono’s art which lead to later works for peace activism. Featuring art historian and gallery director Midori Yoshimoto.
A Brief Genealogy of Cracks
Board of Officers Room
Featuring Karen Shimakawa, author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage, in conversation with interdisciplinary researcher and experimental performance artist Allen S. Weiss.
3:30pm–4:30pm
The Harassed Subject: “RAPE” (dir. Ono 1969) Then & Now
Veterans Room
The script for Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s film “RAPE” appears in Ono’s Thirteen Film Scores (1968): “The cameraman will chase a girl on the street with a camera persistently until he corners her in an alley and, if possible, until she is in a falling position.” The film’s title is a provocation. In this lecture, art critic and professor Jennifer Doyle unpacks this experiment and situates it in relation to the contemporary political moment and its media ecologies.
Memories of a Supernatural AIDS Crisis
Board of Officers Room
Inspired by Yoko Ono’s dedication to social justice through art, this performance reimagines the AIDS pandemic within a utopian landscape. A hundred years from now, Detroit stands as Earth’s last refuge and has been transformed by a strange biomedical dust. This queer sci-fi drama, written and directed by Marc Arthur, will be presented with Detroit-based artists Pink Flowers and Yolanda Jack in a performance that follows a Black trans cybernetic heroine and an ancient vampire as they fall in love and inhabit memories from AIDS history.
4:30pm
Always Thinking About Cut Piece
Veterans Room
Featuring art historian and critic Julia Bryan Wilson.
5:00pm–5:45pm
Occupation and the Body: Contours of Liberation
Board of Officers Room
Featuring Founder of the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative Nimmi Gowrinathan in conversation with Valeria Luiselli. Drawing on two decades of work with women in the Tamil Tigers and other liberation struggles to break imaginative barriers limiting our view of the female fighter, this talk considers Yoko Ono’s work inside a new line of inquiry that returns to a body re-politicized through the mind. Anchored in the narratives of women in war zones, excerpted readings from a forthcoming text (Occupation and the Body: Five Acts) set forth a series of questions that excavate and make visible a deeper terrain for solidarity activism to take root. Gowrinathan asks, how does the violence of space designed toward occupation settle in the bodies of the besieged? How do gendered bodies adopt postures of preservation, sacrificing movement for life? How do contortions to accommodate pain reconfigure a stronger collective body politic?
6:00pm–6:45pm
Interventions: Seizing the Moment
Board of Officers Room
A conversation between Guggenheim fellow and Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Grant recipient Claire Bishop and award-winning gender and sexuality scholar Jack Halberstam.
Sunday, February 16
1:00pm–2:00pm
Yoko Ono’s Legacy: Art Meets Music
Veterans Room
Music is integral to Yoko Ono’s artistic practice and her recordings and live performances offered a new model for creating song structures, using the human voice and channeling intensity. Once derided, Ono is now recognized as a major influence on musicians in and beyond punk and art rock. The free-wheeling conversations with two artists who’ve forged their own paths with Ono’s light guiding them considers how her wild, open-hearted music changed things. With pioneering musician and multidisciplinary artist Nona Hendryx and singer-songwriter and actor Justin Vivian Bond, moderated by NPR Music critic and correspondent Ann Powers.
Fly in Power: Asian Migrant Massage Workers and Anti-trafficking
Board of Officers Room
Fetishized through a complex history of US military imperialism, Asian migrant massage and sex workers are pinned as both victims and criminals by anti-trafficking and prison industrial systems. Together, they create circles of care, mutual aid, and advocacy for labor rights and social justice. Presentation and conversation hosted by Yin Qi of Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of migrant massage and sex workers of Asian diaspora, based in Queens.
2:00pm–2:15pm
Plastic
Veterans Room
In this virtual presentation from Oceania in proximity to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Filipino-American cultural critic, writer and queer studies scholar Karen Tongson reconsiders the slogan “YOU are the Plastic Ono Band” through the apparatuses of telecommunication, while working through Ono’s equation: “total communication equals peace” from 1971.
2:15pm–3:15pm
Unfinished Grief Symphony: Yoko Ono and the Art of the Breakdown
Veterans Room
A meditation on the dynamics of grief, shattering, and coming undone in the work of Yoko Ono as these things occur in the un-ending season of glass in which we find ourselves. Featuring leading performance studies scholar Joshua Takano Chambers Leston.
Yoko Ono’s Film No. 4 (Bottoms) and the aesthetics of jelly
Board of Officers Room
Scholar and critic Kyla Wazana Tompkins considers gelatinousness as an aesthetic that indexes how deviant life persists beyond and despite the aesthetic strictures of normativity. Putting Yoko Ono’s groundbreaking Bums video into conversation with late twentieth century pornographic art, Tompkins shows how the haptic, movemental, and tactile quality that we might term “the gelatinous” allows for authors and artists to theorize different forms of collective movement and sociality.
3:30pm–4:30pm
Dialogue at Forest Edge
Veterans Room
In 1971, Yoko Ono claimed to have released a swarm of flies in MoMA’s sculpture garden, which then invaded the museum and the city at large. The talk will take this gesture as a starting point to trace the place of the non-human in New York and beyond. Featuring New York-based artist Michael Wang in conversation with environmental, architectural, and memorial artist Maya Lin.
In the (event of) blink
Board of Officers Room
In this talk, Yoko Ono’s early work will be taken as a point of departure for a speculative history of performance art, a history filled with penumbral spaces and decisive singular acts. NYU professor André T. Lepecki attends to some of Ono’s early actions, showing how they mobilized obscurity and duration, decisive acts and incisive lingerings that created what Barbara Hiskell called, appropriately, “a new mode of performance art.” Ono’s actions propose, in their singularity, a renewed understanding of performance in 20th century art history, and therefore, and inevitably, an alternative performance theory.
4:45pm–5:10pm
A Black Forest for Poetic Justice
Veterans Room
Black Forest is an initiative founded by Ekene Ijeoma to record over 40,000 stories about Black lives (past, present, and future) and plant over 40,000 trees for Black lives across all 50 states within 8 years. In partnership with local governments, nonprofits, and communities, he’s planted over 500 trees across parks, lawns, and sidewalks across 8 states: Michigan (Melvindale), Massachusetts (Boston), San Francisco, Florida (Florida City, Miami), Missouri (St. Louis), Rhode Island (Providence), Washington (Seattle), and New York (Bronx). He’s developing partnerships to start recording stories via a phone hotline and linking them to the trees via extension and QR codes.
4:45pm–5:45pm
Archiving and Inheriting the Avant-Garde—A Scream in the Dark
Board of Officers Room
A conversation featuring curator, writer, and archivist Sur Rodney (Sur); visual artist, film maker, writer, media artist, choreographer and performer Jack Waters; Co-Founder and Executive Director of Culture Push Clarinda Mac Low; and multimedia artist Peter Cramer.
5:15pm
WAR IS OVER (PAINTING TO BE DESTROYED)
Veterans Room
“PAINTING TO EXIST ONLY WHEN IT’S COPIED OR PHOTOGRAPHED:
Let People copy or photograph your paintings. Destroy the originals. Spring 1964.”
WAR IS OVER (PAINTING TO BE DESTROYED) is a painting-performance engaging the aforementioned prompt from Yoko Ono’s collection of drawings and instructions in Grapefruit. The performance is a collaboration between long-time friends: Palestinian-American artist, Waseem Nafisi, and Trinidadian artist, Taya Serrao. With the piece’s impending destruction in mind, the artist-duo reference Ono’s global anti-war media campaign and its iconic phrasing: “WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It).”
6:00pm–7:00pm
Everything in the Universe is Unfinished: A Concluding Reflection
Board of Officers Room
A conversation featuring Tavia Nyong’o, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Brigid Cohen.
Making Space at the Armory is made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF).
Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature as well as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams.
Photo: Matthew Placek
February 15–16, 2025
Saturday, February 15 from 1:00pm–7:00pm
Sunday, February 16 from 1:00pm–7:00pm
Event Details
Various Spaces
Tickets
Tickets: $35 per day (plus fees)
Includes admission to the Wish Tree installation
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