Day for Yoko Ono

Day for Yoko Ono is part one of two days held in celebration of the close of Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at the MCA.

In this fulsome day, see a rare performance of Ono’s influential Cut Piece (1967), a participatory work that invites the audience to slowly cut away the clothing of the performer, restaged live by artist Anna Martine Whitehead. Later, she is joined onstage by DJ Lady D (Darlene Jackson), Aram Han Sifuentes, and Hannah Higgins to discuss Ono’s influence on art, performance, and music. The day is capped with a screening of Fluxfilm Anthology, a set of more than 30 short films by Ono and her contemporaries, introduced by scholar Magdalena Holdar.

Find information and tickets to part two, Night for Yoko Ono, on the event page.

About the Participants

Aram Han Sifuentes (she/they) is a fiber and social practice artist whose work centers participatory, community-based projects addressing immigration, immigrant labor, citizenship, voting, protest, and belonging. She creates collaborative projects that use textiles as tools for storytelling, community building, and political resistance, foregrounding participants’ lived experiences, politics, and voices. Community engagement has been central to Sifuentes’s practice for over a decade. Her ongoing projects include Protest Banner Lending Library and Citizenship for All: Storytelling Through Nonggi Making, developed in collaboration with HANA Center, which mobilize intergenerational and multi-ethnic immigrant communities through collective making and action.

Her work has been presented nationally and internationally at venues including the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, moCa Cleveland, Skirball Cultural Center, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has received numerous awards, including a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Joyce Award, MAP Fund, Center for Craft Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship, Designing a Better Chicago Impact Grant, 3Arts Award and Next Level/Spare Room Award. She is currently a professor, adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a board member of the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC).

Hannah B. Higgins serves as co-executor of the estate of Fluxus pioneer Dick Higgins and his Something Else Press. A Professor in the School of Art and Art History at UIC, Higgins founded the interdisciplinary BA in IDEAS program. Known for innovative lecture/performances that blend sensory experience with rigorous scholarship, she explores the radical art movement Fluxus and the historic avant-garde. Her acclaimed books include Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002), The Grid Book (MIT, 2009), and the co-edited Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (University of California Press, 2012). She is currently completing The People’s Flag, examining the cultural history of the American flag in politics and art.

Magdalena Holdar is Associate Professor of Art History and Head of Curating and Curatorial Research at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. Holdar’s research on the international avant-garde network Fluxus includes articles, and catalogue essays on artists such as Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, and Ken Friedman. She is also the author of Fluxus as a Network or Friends, Strangers, and Things (Brill, 2022). Her current research focuses on the presence of Fluxus in Scandinavia, with particular attention to the contribution of the Swedish artist and folklore scholar Bengt af Klintberg.

Darlene Jackson, aka DJ Lady D, is hailed as “Chicago’s House Music Queen” by Chicago Magazine. She has toured the world as an international DJ, producer, and remixer and, in 2004, she became a music publisher when she launched her independent record label and brand, D’lectable. She is well-known for her charismatic sets of house, techno, and disco; her appearances at ARC, SXSW, Lollapalooza, Burning Man, and Chosen Few; and for fan-filled, influencer, charity, and celebrity events. Her music career has been a featured subject in print, television, audio, and film media, including in several music documentaries, and she has also collaborated and worked with numerous media outlets. You can hear DJ Lady D on the radio on the fourth Friday of every month on Vocalo.org 91.1 FM-Chicago.

Anna Martine Whitehead does performance from the homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations; as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sauk and Meskwaki; the Kiikaapoi, Peoria, and the Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) Nations. Martine’s solo and collaborative work have been presented by MCA Chicago, REDCAT, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, MoMA, San José Museum of Art, The Chocolate Factory Theater, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has developed her craft working closely with Takahiro Yamamoto, Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, and the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, among others.

Martine and her work have been recognized by the New England Foundation for the Arts, National Performance Network, the Graham Foundation, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, MAP Fund, Dance/USA, 3Arts, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She has written about blackness, queerness, and bodies in action and contributed chapters to a range of publications including In the Horizontal Plane: taisha paggett performance works (Soberscove, forthcoming), Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017), and Platforms: Ten Years of Chances Dances (2016). Martine is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).