Yoko Ono’s late husband, John Lennon, called her “the world’s most famous unknown artist.” Ono appeared on most Americans’ radar in 1968 as Lennon’s girlfriend. As a young teen, Kurt Andersen knew Ono was some kind of artist, but he was far more focused on how she seemed to be affecting Lennon’s public persona. The rest is history — or myth. But before she became a character in the Beatles saga, Ono was a groundbreaking young artist in New York. Kurt visits a new retrospective of her work called “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show 1960-1971,” which runs all summer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Much of her half-century-old artwork would look at home in a gallery today.

See some of Ono's exhibit below.

In addition to her art, Ono’s music was well known among the avant-garde, if not the mainstream. But in recent years, Ono has found big-time success with ten number one dance singles, and remixes by artists like DJ Spooky and Peaches. Forty years after she founded the original Plastic Ono Band with Lennon, Ono recorded the album Between My Head and the Sky under the same moniker with their son, Sean. Making the album, Ono said, it brought back memories of her collaboration with John. “I was on the couch, closing my eyes, and suddenly someone put a coat on me. John used to do that when we were making Double Fantasy,” Ono tells Kurt Andersen. “In my sleepy head I thought that was John. Then I opened my eyes, and it was Sean. It was exactly the same army surplus coat.”

Ono’s work has always been animated by her feminism. Sometimes that means using vocal techniques that don’t sound traditionally pretty. “I want to break the sound barrier to show that the woman has a strong voice, too,” she says. “Women’s plight, so to speak, is still there.”

(Originally aired: October 2, 2009)

Yoko Ono with a participatory work at MoMA

(Ryan Muir)

Yoko Ono with Standing Woman at The Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden in 1960

(Minoru Niizuma/Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive)

Yoko Ono with Painting to See in the Dark (Version 1), AG Gallery, New York, 1961

(George Maciunas)

Half-A-Room by Yoko Ono (1967)

(Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art )

Installation view of Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

(Thomas Griesel)