Mended Petal

Yoko Ono is an artist, musician, poet, and peace activist. Since the early 1960s, audience participation and social activism have been crucial aspects of her work. Ono is widely regarded as a pioneer of early conceptual, film, and performance art and is known for her involvement in the Fluxus movement. She collaborated on art and musical projects with her husband John Lennon until his death in 1980 as well. In recent years Ono has focused on environmental protection and human rights in numerous public actions.

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Mended Petal is the 13th petal from the artist’s installation Skylanding, a 12-petal lotus sculpture in Chicago’s Jackson Park that rises from the ashes of the Phoenix Pavilion, which was a gift from Japan to the people of Chicago following the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and was destroyed by arson in 1946. In contrast to the smooth petals of Skylanding, Mended Petal shows the seams of its repair, commemorating the ground-healing ceremony the artist held on June 12, 2015, to prepare the site of the lost Phoenix Pavilion for new work.

Metaphors for mending and healing appear often in Ono’s art, such as in Mend Piece (1966), which invited visitors to sit together at a table and repair broken cups using glue, sticky tape, and thread. Such acts of repair refer to the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, in which broken porcelain is mended with lacquer that has been mixed or dusted with gold.