On Viðey Island, near Reykjavík, Iceland, a beam of light shines up into the sky, penetrating the clouds up to an altitude of at least 4,000 meters. The light comes from the Imagine Peace Tower, a work conceived by Yoko Ono as a memorial to John Lennon and dedicated to peace.

It consists of a white stone monument in the form of a wishing well, which contains six powerful lights that shine across it and are reflected into the sky with mirrors. Nine more lights shine upward, forming a column of light that changes in intensity and brilliance with the weather conditions.

In reference to John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” and in the style of Yoko Ono’s instruction pieces, the words “Imagine Peace” are inscribed on the base of the tower in 24 languages:

IMAGINE PEACE. به صلح بیندیش‎‎. TUFIKIRIENI AMANI. してごらん. HUGSA SÉR FRIÐ. 평화를 꿈꾸자. BARIŞI DÜŞLE. 想像世界有了和平. احلم سلام‎‎. ILARAWAN ANG MUNDONG MAPAYAPA. சமாதானத்தை நினையுங்கள். IMAGINE A PAZ. ПРЕДСТАВЬТЕ СЕБЕ МИР. KÉPZELD EL A BÉKÉT. शान्ति की कल्पना करें. KUVITTELE RAUHA. STELL DIR VOR ES IST FRIEDEN. წარმოიდგინეთ მშვიდობა. IMMAGINA LA PACE. ཞི་བ་སྒོམས་. IMAGINEZ LA PAIX. חלום שלום‎‎. ᓴᐃᒪᖃᑎᒌᑦᑕ. IMAGINA LA PAZ.

The Imagine Peace Tower was dedicated in 2007 and has been illuminated annually from October 9 (Lennon’s birthday) through December 8 (the anniversary of his death); from the Winter Solstice on December 21 through December 31; on Ono’s birthday on February 18; and during the first week of spring from March 20 through March 27. The lights use 75 kW of electricity, which is generated in Iceland from geothermal energy.

More than a million written wishes are buried below the tower. They have been collected from various installations of Ono’s Wish Tree, a participatory and ongoing series in which a tree is planted and visitors are invited to tie written wishes to it.

“Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree. Ask your friends to do the same. Keep wishing. Until the branches are covered with wishes.”

In addition to Ono’s Wish Trees, which have been planted in some two dozen installations since 1996, wishes may be mailed to the tower in Iceland, or submitted online by email or tweet.

IMAGINE PEACE TOWER time lapse video – night of 19 Oct 2013. Think PEACE, Act PEACE, Spread PEACE. Shed light in darkness. IMAGINE PEACE. All we are saying is Give Peace A Chance. All we are saying is Give Peace A Chance.

A video posted by IMAGINE PEACE TOWER (@imaginepeacetower) on Nov 19, 2013 at 8:41pm PST

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Yoko Ono: Lumière de L’aube opens this week at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon. The exhibition follows One Woman Show at MoMA in New York, and is Yoko Ono’s first retrospective in France.

Ono was a significant influence on the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, and her work includes films, installations, performances, instruction-based texts, and participatory installations. Notwithstanding her international reputation, large exhibitions of Yoko Ono’s work were relatively infrequent until the last decade. Ono’s late husband, John Lennon, said that she is “the world’s most famous unknown artist: everyone knows her name, but no one knows what she actually does.”

MAC Lyon has a notable history of early solo exhibitions; Keith Haring, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Cai Guo-Qiang, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Marina Abramović and Ulay are just a partial list. The museum’s Renzo Piano-designed building functions perfectly for its avant-garde exhibitions program. It presents a Neoclassical façade towards Lyon’s great Parc de la Tête d’Or, but otherwise fits neatly into Piano’s modern Cité Internationale. Inside, MAC features a changeable wall system that can accommodate any possible gallery configuration with 2,800 square meters across three floors.

For Lumière de l’Aube (Light of the Dawn), MAC has devoted the entire building to more than 100 works by Yoko Ono that span from 1952 to 2016. The title may seem generic, but in Lyon is specific as a reference to the Lumière Brothers, the city’s history, and perhaps the development of new artistic mediums.

The exhibition features an entire section of Ono’s conceptual “instruction paintings,” which include simple instructions for action to be taken by the reader. Painting to Be Stepped On, for example, becomes a completed artwork only after it is covered with footprints. These works can only be realized with participation from people other than the artist. They can be performed by different people in different ways, and are always transformed with the passage of time.

In addition to the instruction pieces, there are large sections for music, text works, peaceful activities, and interaction. WAR IS OVER!, Bed-In for Peace, and Wish Tree are highlights of the latter two sections and of Yoko Ono’s work as a peace activist. Wish Tree, in particular, is participatory beyond this exhibition as an ongoing installation and series since 1996.

“Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree. Ask your friends to do the same. Keep wishing. Until the branches are covered with wishes.”

Wishes are collected and buried at the base of the Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island near Reykjavik, Iceland, and may also be mailed. At MAC Lyon, visitors are encouraged to create their own Wish Trees and share them online with #WishTrees and #YokoOnoLyon.

Yoko Ono: Lumière de L’aube opens on March 9 and continues through July 17, 2016.

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In 1971, Yoko Ono placed ads in the Village Voice and The New York Times announcing The Museum of Modern [F]art, her one-woman show at MoMA. The 100-page exhibition catalogue included an image of Yoko Ono in MoMA’s sculpture garden with a jar of flies, which were to be released into the city and then photographed as they buzzed across New York.

When visitors arrived for the exhibition, from December 1 to 15, 1971, a sign at the entrance invited them to track the flies, which had already dispersed, and a handwritten note on the museum’s ticket counter advised, “This Is Not Here.” In fact, it wasn’t. Notwithstanding newspaper ads, the catalogue, and MoMA visitors who gave their opinions about the show, the exhibition was conceptual and hadn’t happened at all.  

Today, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971 actually opened at MoMA. For real. It’s official. There are 125 objects in the museum’s sixth-floor galleries. Critics of MoMA’s Björk or Marina Abramović exhibitions may take pause. Yoko Ono will be popular with visitors, but it’s art world approved with solid content. Ono’s work has early connections to Fluxus, and her career beyond that has included experimental film, instruction-based text works, participatory installations, and performance art. She’s also wonderful on Twitter.

Among the films presented, Cut Piece is requisite in contemporary art history courses. In the 1964 performance (MoMA is showing the film from a 1965 performance), Ono asks visitors to cut away pieces of her clothing while she sits still on a stage.

Also from 1964, the typewritten/handwritten contents of Grapefruit are displayed, page-by-page, on a very long wall. The book of instructions includes entries such as “Listen to the sound of the earth turning,” and “Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.” Ono’s additional instructions were to “Burn this book after you’ve read it,” and John Lennon added, “This is the greatest book I’ve ever burned.” The sequel, Acorn, was published in 2013.

The exhibition also includes facsimiles of original installations including Painting to be Stepped On (1960/61), Bag Piece (1964), and Apple (1966). Painting to Be Stepped On is not only a title, but also an instruction, and Bag Piece invites visitors to get into a black cloth bag while others look on. These installations are participatory and confound the “do not touch” custom of art museums. Apple is actually an apple, on a plexiglas pedestal with a brass plaque, which will be left to decompose until it is a seed again.

In a recent interview for ARTnews, Yoko Ono summed up this exhibition and explicated the significance of her conceptual work:

“There was a conceptual show,” she said, “and then there’s a reality that came from it a long time later”—referring to the current, real-life exhibition at MoMA. “And likewise,” she continued, “I think that we’re all thinking of having world peace, and I’m sure that’s going to happen, in reality. What I was doing in my work was not just showing how great I am as an artist or something. I was showing how you can deal with life. If you think about it conceptually, it can happen later.”

Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971 draws from MoMA’s 2008 acquisition of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection.

The exhibition continues through September 7, 2015.

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