Summer of Yoko Ono

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree for Washington, DC, the Hirshhorn presents a selection of the artist’s most iconic and emotionally charged installations and performances.

A gift from the artist in 2007, Wish Tree is a perennial favorite at the Hirshhorn. Over the past decade, nearly 80,000 wishes have been collected and sent to Ono’s Imagine Peace Tower, an outdoor artwork in Iceland that memorializes John Lennon. By tying handwritten wishes to the branches of the Japanese Dogwood, visitors can once more contribute to Ono’s international effort to promote peace and prosperity.

Spanning the length of the Museum’s lobby, My Mommy Is Beautiful  joins the Wish Tree as another of Yoko Ono’s interactive artworks. The forty-foot long installation invites visitors to bring a photograph or write a thought or memory about their mothers and attach it to the canvased wall. Ultimately, the wall will be obscured by layers of memories and images, thus unfolding a spirited and monumental tribute to mothers around the world.

Ono’s Sky TV for Washington, DC (1966), a twenty-four-hour live feed of the sky outside, will be reinstalled on the Museum’s Third Level. Conceived during a time when Ono lived in a windowless apartment and dreamed of having the sky inside, Sky TV was one of the first works of art to harness the instant feedback capability of video, acting as a timely commentary on technology’s replacement of nature.

Best known for her conceptual installations and experimental music, Yoko Ono (b. Tokyo, 1933) is a Japanese American performance and multimedia artist whose work is strongly influenced by feminism, human rights, and peace activism. She has had retrospectives in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1989), the Japan Society (2001), and the Museum of Modern Art (2015); as well as in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain. In 2009, she received a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale.