March 23rd, 2026
Dear Leaders,
A few weeks ago, my family and I walked through Yoko Ono’s Music of the Mind exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago. Yoko Ono is 93 years old this year.
From the moment we walked in, we were asked to write a message and leave it on a tree for others to observe. There were thousands of handwritten notes—hopeful, grieving, searching, unresolved. As you moved through each room, which held artifacts from across Ono’s incredible full life, you were constantly asked to participate.
To write and draw on the museum walls in blue marker, creating the space collectively.
To play chess with all white pieces in order to contemplate our sameness.
To take home a puzzle piece of the sky that we all share.
And somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like an exhibit of Yoko Ono’s life’s work and started feeling like something else entirely.
This Week’s Reflection: Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono has spent her life creating work that does not resolve neatly. Work that invites, provokes, and unsettles you. To understand her as simply a cultural figure attached to someone else’s story is to miss the arc entirely and I am so glad I had the chance to see the depth of her in this moment.
She was born in Tokyo in 1933 into a family of significant means, but her childhood was marked by rupture. During World War II, she lived through the firebombing of Tokyo. Her family lost their stability, and there were long stretches where survival depended on endurance and imagination. She has described lying in bed as a child, conjuring meals in her mind to get through hunger.
It is hard not to see the throughline. For Ono, imagination fueled her survival. But being an Ignitor for the rest of us was her mission.
And that pattern, of disruption, loss, reinvention, and exposure, did not end with her childhood.
As a young adult, she moved between Japan and the United States, eventually landing in New York, where she entered an art world that had little space for her. She married composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, and later filmmaker Anthony Cox, relationships that reflected both creative partnership and personal fracture. Her life was not linear. It was marked by starts and stops, by rebuilding again and again.
Perhaps most devastating for her was the loss of her daughter, Kyoko. After her separation from Cox, he took Kyoko and disappeared, raising her in a religious community and cutting off contact for years. Ono spent decades searching for her. The absence was not temporary—it was a long, unresolved grief that stretched across much of her life.
When she arrived more fully into the New York avant-garde scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s, her work did not fit the expectations of the time. It was conceptual before that language was widely accepted. It asked audiences to engage rather than observe. It required participation.
In 1964, she published Grapefruit, a book of simple whimsical and sometimes absurd instructions that felt tied to the act of creation, yet deeply connected to the idea of engagement and agency. Around the same time, she created and performed Cut Piece, sitting silently on stage while audience members were invited to cut away pieces of her clothing. What unfolded was vulnerable, confrontational, and deeply revealing—not only of her, but of the people who stepped forward, some with care and others with a striking lack of restraint.
Her performances, filmed with a hue and almost colorless, weren’t meant to entertain in the traditional sense. They were acts of exposure. Sparks of ignition that were too hard to look away from.
And then came one of the most visible, and most misunderstood, chapters of her life. In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, Yoko Ono and John Lennon staged what they called a “Bed-In for Peace.” For their honeymoon, instead of retreating into privacy, they invited the press into their hotel room in Amsterdam. For days, they sat in bed, talking about peace, answering questions, and refusing to engage in spectacle in the way the media expected.
It was strange. Easy to mock. Many did. On the surface, it could be dismissed as absurd. Watching the footage years later, it was impossible not to see the clarity behind it. To show their commitment to that idea, later that same year, they recorded “Give Peace a Chance” during another Bed-In in Montreal, turning something dismissed as absurd into something enduring.
In a culture often driven by loud noise, they chose repetition: peace, over and over again.
In a world looking for dramatic gestures, they offered something deceptively simple. They take the tools of the current system—media, attention, narrative—and bend them toward something else.
And yet, as her visibility grew, so did the resistance to her.
Yoko Ono became a target for frustration, for projection, for a story people wanted to tell about something ending. Her complexity was reduced. Her authorship questioned. Her presence recast as disruption in the most simplistic sense.
And then, in 1980, another devastation. John Lennon was killed outside their home in New York.
Once again, her life was marked by sudden, public loss. And once again, the narrative around her often failed to hold the depth of what she carried—grief, resilience, and the responsibility of continuing forward with both her own work and his legacy intertwined.
It is a pattern we have seen before. When someone challenges what is familiar (especially from a position that is underestimated, overlooked, or underrepresented) it is often easier to diminish them than to engage with what they are actually doing.
But walking through that exhibit in Chicago, decades later, what becomes unmistakable is not the narrative that followed her, but the throughline that has always been there: she never stopped creating, never stopped inviting others in, never stopped imagining something beyond what was directly in front of her—and, in doing so, never stopped asking the rest of us to do the same.
Why This Matters Now:
Yoko Ono’s work—and her life—reflect a kind of leadership that does not begin with answers, but with a shift in perspective. It is a reframing of what we think is possible, an invitation to see differently and, more importantly, to engage differently.
The Bed-Ins were not policy proposals, nor did they offer a step-by-step plan to end war. Instead, they operated in a different dimension entirely, disrupting the narrative of what protest was supposed to look like. By redirecting attention and creating space for a new kind of conversation—one rooted in simplicity, repetition, and presence—they demonstrated that change does not always begin with solutions, but with a reorientation of how we think and where we focus.
And sometimes, that is where meaningful change begins.
There is a pull, especially right now, toward clarity and certainty, toward leaders who can define what comes next with precision. But moments like this may require something else entirely. They may require imagination—the willingness to move beyond what is already known and into what has yet to be formed. As Yoko often says:
“The job of the artist is not to destroy but to change the value of things”
Ono’s life reminds us that leadership is not always about being followed in the traditional sense. More often, it is about igniting something that others will carry forward, holding a vision long enough for the world to catch up, and continuing that work even in the presence of loss, uncertainty, and complexity.
From Reflection to Action
Since that visit, with my blue sky puzzle piece in hand, I have found myself returning to a few questions.
Where might we be called to create an invitation, rather than a solution?
What if participation in one’s life is the end goal, no matter the outcome?
What are you looking to change the value of?
Because the work of leadership, especially now, may not be about resolution, but about igniting participation. I hope to participate alongside many of you at the No Kings Rally on Saturday. And thank you, Yoko, for all that you have given us.
.
Until Next Week
|
