For those (like me) who sometimes feel that no one notices the quality of the work they’re doing, Yoko Ono‘s remarks about the significance of her belated close-up at the Museum of Modern Art, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971, should resonate.
Then again, most of us don’t have an internationally famous partner to participate in our projects and help boost our public profiles:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
Coincidentally, Ono’s partial retrospective (covering only 11 years of her long career) opened at the same time that the NY Times was publishing a piece, Works in Progress, that ostensibly honored 11 other late-in-life female artists who “we should have known about decades ago.” (Of course, many of us have known about most of those artists for decades, but perhaps not the readership of the “T,” the Times’ style magazine.)
Lamentably, only four of those 11 worthies are profiled in the glossy hardcopy version of the magazine. To learn about the rest, you have to go to the online version. For the Slighted Seven—Joan Semmel, Lorraine O’Grady, Etel Adnan, Faith Ringgold, Judith Bernstein, Michelle Stuart, Rosalyn Drexler—this partial “recognition” must have seemed like a left-handed compliment.
As you’ll hear in my CultureGrrl Video, below, Yoko says that one of the reasons she decided to accept MoMA’s invitation was to let people know “that everything you do is being recognized by people and understood by people and one day it’s going to blossom.”
You’ll also hear her say that for women “life is an ordeal” but that she “just recently realized that men suffer too.” This remark (as you will see in my video) caused MoMA’s embattled curator-at-large, Klaus Biesenbach, to grin.
Although he was co-curator of the show (and, as Ono recounted, he made the initial call to her), Biesenbach did not, to my knowledge, appear in the galleries during the press preview, whereas curator Christophe Cherix was a conspicuous presence. But Klaus was up on the stage for the artist’s comments and must have appreciated her acknowledgment that “both Christophe and Klaus understood what I did in 1971 [when she conceived a self-imagined, self-advertised show—Museum of Modern F(art)].…I thought it was incredible.”