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BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4, Oh Yoko!
On the occasion of Yoko Ono’s 90th birthday, BBC Radio 4’s program includes Yoko in her own words from the BBC archive together with a collage of BBC interviews including Yoko’s contemporary and peer, Nye Ffarrabas (formerly Bici Forbes and Bici Hendricks) reminiscing.
“Dragon-lady”. “Witch”. “The woman who broke up the Beatles”. These are some of the labels that have been commonly used to describe Yoko Ono, a pioneering musician, artist, and activist who can plausibly claim to be one of the most maligned and misunderstood figures in the history of popular culture.
On this edition of Archive On 4, marking her 90th birthday, you’ll hear Yoko Ono on her own terms, in her own words.
Host Jennifer Lucy Allan, a music writer and broadcaster specialising in experimental sound, also assembles a collection of Yoko's peers, friends, and admirers.
Art historian Reiko Tomii reveals how the deprivation and danger of wartime Japan formed Yoko’s artistic worldview.
Sound artist Tomoko Hojo explores how an audience becomes Yoko Ono’s co-collaborator.
Fluxus poet Nye Ffarrabas remembers baring her bottom for one of Yoko’s seminal works.
Rock star Peaches reflects on Yoko Ono’s infamy.
Music writer David Keenan asserts that Yoko is "the best Beatle".
Producer: Mae-Li Evans
Executive Producer: Jack Howson
Sound Mix: Mike Woolley
A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 4
BBC archive interviews featured:
Late Night Line-Up (BBC 2 - 1967)
Parkinson (BBC 1 - 1971)
Andy Peebles (BBC Radio 1 - 1980)
Face To Face (BBC TV - 1998)
Kaleidoscope (BBC Radio 4 - 1998)
Friday Night With Jonathan Ross (BBC 1 - 2003)
Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4 - 2007)
Andrew Marr Show (BBC 1 - 2007)
The First Time (BBC Radio 6 Music - 2016)
1960s Fluxus Artist Nye Ffarrabas Celebrated at Brattleboro’s C.X. Silver Gallery
She went to happenings with Allan Kaprow and on mushroom treks with John Cage. She was in a Yoko Ono film, performed in avant-garde festivals and dined with Marcel Duchamp. Nye Ffarrabas, aka Bici (Forbes) Hendricks, was a central figure in the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s. She and others created intermedia events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music and theater. They erased distinctions between art and life as they celebrated daily activities. Their radical aesthetics influenced subsequent postmodern performance and visual art.
Seven Days 27 (36) pp.32-34, article by John Killacky photo of Nye by Dona Ann McAdams
She went to happenings with Allan Kaprow and on mushroom treks with John Cage. She was in a Yoko Ono film, performed in avant-garde festivals and dined with Marcel Duchamp. Nye Ffarrabas, aka Bici (Forbes) Hendricks, was a central figure in the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s. She and others created intermedia events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music and theater. They erased distinctions between art and life as they celebrated daily activities. Their radical aesthetics influenced subsequent postmodern performance and visual art.
Ffarrabas' works are in museum collections around the country, including at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. But several factors conspired to blur art history, leaving far too few who remember Ffarrabas' legacy. After divorcing her husband, Geoff Hendricks, she left New York, had multiple careers while still making art and changed her name.
In 1982, she moved permanently to Brattleboro, where she has created art and worked as a psychotherapist ever since. There, at C.X. Silver Gallery, her legacy is known and celebrated. In 2014, the gallery hosted "Nye Ffarrabas: A Walk on the Inside," a 50-year retrospective. Many of Ffarrabas' works are still on exhibit at the gallery, which serves as the repository of her archives.
Seven Days 27 (36) pp.32-34, article by John Killacky photo of Nye by Dona Ann McAdams
