In the early 1960s, Yoko Ono established herself as a challenging and often puzzling artist. She worked across the boundaries of media, making impossible to categorize her work in any field. A pioneer in conceptual art, video, and installation, Ono also crossed the boundaries into design with projects that took the form of advertising and designed artifacts. Alexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks have surveyed the forty years of Ono's career in a richly illustrated book with essays and contributions by many scholars, including Kevin Concannon, Joan Rothfuss, and Kristine Stiles. The superb documentation includes an anthology of Ono's own writings compiled by Jon Hendricks, together with an excellent chronology and bibliography. Ken Friedman. "Alexandra Munroe with Jon Hendricks: Yes Yoko Ono." Book review published in Design Research News, Volume 6, Number 5, May 2001 ISSN 1473-3862.

I was at the SFMOMA to see her YES exhibition, and exactly what I expected, I was overwhelmed with delight... Her art is whimsically amazing. Her music touches your heart and soul. Seeing all the people there that day, I was glad that Yoko is finally getting all the respect she deserves, after all these years... Also caught her live performance at the Los Angeles's Roxy almost 6 years ago just took my breath away. I truly think she's one of the true visionaries of our time.

The price of fame can be extremely high; Yoko Ono came to prominence because of her relationship to super-celebrity John Lennon. Without this association to Lennon, she'd probably be relegated to the rarified world of conceptual art and never be a household name. But the fame came at a high price; she was villified for her influence on the pop-cult Beatles and blamed for their demise. This is unfair; the Beatles would have evolved and changed without any help from Yoko Ono or Linda Eastman McCartney. And then she suffered the cruelest blow of all, to have her husband murdered by a crazed fan.

I became a fan of her art in the 60's when I read about some of her "performance" art; one favorite; she dressed herself in her best dress,gave scissors to members of an audience, sat down in a chair and encouraged them to take snips out of her dress. At first, people were shy to do so, then as one or another became bolder and snipped bits from the dress, the group became practically frenzied and she felt even worried they would go farther than just snipping a dress with the shears. A wonderful elucidation of human behavior and original; it gave new insight into ourselves and thus was truly a work of art. Other works that impressed me were photos of the bottoms of bare feet, from under a glass surface, and of course the film of buttocks, which I personally never did have a chance to see, but loved the idea of.

This book is a tremendous resource of information into Yoko Ono's varied art including her music. (No reason why a CD can't be part of a book, great idea.) This book is a fine retrospective, and I only regret that Yoko Ono will never fully take her place in modern art because of the diluting influence of pop culture on her history, and because conceptual art still has not been given the same validity as other media. (Christo perhaps is the only one to have transcended this barrier, because he sells prints of his monumentally engineered and staged concepts.)