Yoko Ono’s Art Is an Exercise in Hope

Debra Brehmer | Hyperallergic | 20th January 2026

Ono is one of the world’s “most generous artists,” says the writer, because she incorporates the viewer into her work. By the mid 1960’s she was well known in the art avant garde through works such as Cut Piece (1964) where audiences snipped pieces from her dress. Compared to her work after meeting John Lennon, the early work seems “more radical … collaboration diminished [her] female brazenness”. Says one writer “That tension—between doing and thinking—is where Ono’s art lives.”