Yoko Ono to Receive Medal Honoring Her ‘Distinctively Inventive’ Life in Art

After decades of creating subversive art and music, Yoko Ono will receive a lifetime achievement award. MacDowell, an organization that offers artists residencies, will honor the artist with its Edward MacDowell Medal at an event in Peterborough, New Hampshire, this summer.

Ono, 91, is not expected to attend the ceremony, though. Her longtime manager, David Newgarden, will accept the award on her behalf during the presentation on July 21. The event will include an opening of MacDowell’s studios.

“It’s an incredible honor that my mother, Yoko Ono, will be awarded the MacDowell Medal,” her son Sean Ono Lennon, who recently won an Oscar for an animated short about his parents, said in a statement. “The history and list of past recipients is truly remarkable. It makes me very proud to see her art appreciated and celebrated in this way.” (Previous honorees include Robert Frost, Willem de Kooning, Toni Morrison, and David Lynch.)

“MacDowell is honored to celebrate Yoko Ono for her groundbreaking, distinctly inventive, and enormously influential interdisciplinary art,” author Nell Painter, MacDowell’s board chairperson and a Fellow, said. “There has never been anyone like her; there has never been work like hers. Over some seven decades, she has rewarded eyes, provoked thought, inspired feminists, and defended migrants through works of a wide-ranging imagination. Enduringly fresh and pertinent, her uniquely powerful oeuvre speaks to our own times, so sorely needful of her leitmotif: Peace.”

Painter cited Ono’s 1964 performance, Cut Piece, in which she invited viewers to cut pieces of her clothing away, as important commentary on “gender, class, and cultural identity,” saying it, “immediately becoming the feminist classic it remains.” Painter also pointed to songs Ono recorded with John Lennon, “Give Peace a Chance” and “War Is Over,” citing the way Ono added “if you want it” to the latter song as having power, calling the parenthetical “words we cherish now.”

Laurie Anderson served as chairperson for the selection committee.

Ono, born in Tokyo in 1933, moved to New York City in 1960 and immersed herself in the arts world there. Since then, she has made visual art, performance art, films, and avant-garde music, and her work was inspirational to Fluxus art movement and to conceptual artists in general, according to the Museum of Modern Art.

Her lifetime of work is currently the subject of an exhibition at London’s Tate Modern.