Children Gain Valuable Lessons On Art, Gender, Family, Love, And Peace In New Yoko Ono Picture Book

Travel back to 1930s Tokyo, some three decades before Yoko Ono joined New York City’s flourishing downtown art scene and her conceptual artist’s book Grapefruit (1964) emerged as a seminal work of the Fluxus movement, an international, interdisciplinary, avant-garde community of artists, composers, designers, and poets founded in the 1960s and continuing today.

In her new picture book, CAN YOU IMAGINE?: The Art and Life of Yoko Ono, author Lisa Tolin fluidly draws children ages four to eight into the multidisciplinary world of Ono, who helped to usher in a new era of Conceptual art, Minimalism, performance, and video, by introducing the artist as a young girl. Children navigate a changing world, moving with Ono to New York City in 1952 and witnessing her early struggles through Tolin’s emotional, poetic narrative.

“Yoko and her siblings escape to the countryside.
They are hungry.
Her brother is frightened and weak.
Yoko gazes through gaps in the roof
and imagines
that instead of fire,
the sky might
overflow with food.”

Ono’s pre-fame life is highly relatable and timeless in Tolin’s literary journey, illustrated by Yas Imamura. Children learn valuable lessons of gender norms and ideals and familial pressure to conform, an ongoing battle especially for those who encounter culture shock when moving to a new continent. Imamura’s dreamy, ethereal imagery amplifies Tolin’s triumphant text – infused with feminism and passion for art, love, and peace – and underscores Ono’s enduring impact on the global art world.

“After the war, Yoko takes piano lessons from her father.
She wants to be a composer, but he tells her that is no job for a woman.
She is expected to get married, but her mother tells her she is
‘handsome,’ not pretty.”

Tolin delves into experiences that inform Ono’s radical art and activism, a lesson necessary to understanding how counter culture bled its way into the art historical canon.

Tolin reveals how collaborating as artists deepens the bond between Ono and her future husband John Lennon, even as he’s embraced by mainstream audiences and she’s reviled by the masses for her failure to create art that resonates with prescribed social and cultural expectations. Tolin doesn’t candy coat the animosity, helping children to understand how artists and Others continue to be misunderstood and how that lack of appreciation fuels abhorrence.

“Soon they fall in love. But John is already loved. And almost instantly, Yoko is hated.
People say Yoko’s art is strange and her music is not very good. Worse, they say she is breaking up the Beatles. They don’t even like the way she looks.
Yoko has been criticized before. She remembers the rocks thrown by
playmates, and bombs dropped by a country she once called home.
After all these years, Yoko knows how to pick herself up.”

Through the darkest moments and her dreams, Ono finds light to guide her and Lennon’s creative and personal journeys, leaving readers with the hope emanating from her interactive artwork WISH TREE (1996), which remains central to many of her exhibitions around the world.

“From all those wishes, light is beamed
toward an endless sky.”

Borrowing from her career as a journalist, Tolin caps the children’s tale with an essay inspired by her 2005 interview to discuss Ono’s musical celebrating Lennon’s life.

Ono, now 93, told Tolin she wants to be remembered as “Yoko Ono, the wife, mother, and artist,” rather than “Yoko Ono, the woman who broke up the Beatles.”

“I think most women are wearing many hats,” Ono said to Tolin. “We take all sorts of roles, and that’s how it goes. I’m just a woman.”

Life lessons, elegantly written into this comprehensive yet condensed biography, are accessible at $19.99 in the 48-page book published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers.