I was sitting with a friend at Second Cup and the conversation came around to Yoko Ono. No other public figure teeters between adoration and unfounded opprobrium. At some point in the conversation, I said that I would make Christmas Gifts for Yoko Ono: paper sculptures and odd little concept pieces. We laughed, but the idea stuck with me.<\/p>\n
In 2012,\u00a0I lost both my grandmothers<\/a>\u00a0and, like most times when you lose something, the thing lost becomes the most important thing to you. I have been thinking a lot about grandmotherness. And I started thinking about Yoko Ono as a\u00a0cultural grandmother<\/a>. Love her or hate her, every contemporary artist owes some gratitude to Yoko Ono. Painting to Be Stepped On<\/em> taught us that art need not be on a wall. The concerts she hosted at\u00a0112 Chambers Street<\/a>\u00a0taught us that you can change music forever from a sparsely furnished apartment. Grapefruit<\/a><\/em>\u00a0taught us that all you have to do to make art is think. The Fluxus Film\u00a0No. 4<\/a>\u00a0taught us to be sexy. The performance of\u00a0Cut Piece<\/a><\/em>\u00a0at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo taught us to trust each other.\u00a0Painting to Hammer a Nail In<\/a><\/em>\u00a0taught us that we don\u2019t make art alone. The\u00a0tower of light<\/a>\u00a0that beams into the sky two months each year from an island off of\u00a0Reykjavik\u00a0and the 500,000 wishes buried underneath it taught us to think monumental. Yoko Ono embodies the avant-garde, but what makes her work and her life remarkable is this: In the face of ridicule, ignorance, and sometimes outright hatred, Yoko Ono makes art that is free of cynicism, bitterness, and irony. That\u2019s amazing.<\/p>\n 2012 was a year of sorting things out, except I\u00a0didn’t\u00a0realize it until the very end. It was a good year. Things kept getting better and the better they got, the less satisfied I became. The less satisfied I got, the angrier I became. And when my grandmother died, I decided to drive from Montreal to Miami. A 2700-kilometer road trip is a great way to figure things out. One of the conclusions I came to was that I\u00a0wasn’t\u00a0writing and making art as much as I wanted.<\/p>\n \u201cTwelve Days of Christmas Gifts for Yoko Ono\u201d was an art making and writing project that pays homage to a cultural grandmother. Each day from December 25th, 2012 to Epiphany on January 6th, 2013, I made and shared a Christmas gift for Yoko Ono.<\/p>\n The Christmas Gifts were published in ARTSHOP Magazine.<\/p>\n