There are two Yoko Ono Wishing Trees that I know of: One at the Guggenheim in Venice. One at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Both were surprises and both filled me with hope for all those people standing there, writing wishes on paper slips, hanging them like Christmas ornaments, not at …
There are two Yoko Ono Wishing Trees that I know of:
One at the Guggenheim in Venice.
One at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Both were surprises and both filled me with hope for all those people standing there, writing wishes on paper slips, hanging them like Christmas ornaments, not at all shy…and then leaving them behind them; a wake of hope for others to witness. I loved that in both cases, people were fingering through the hung wishes, smiling fondly. What permission it was to be given that opportunity to witness and to wish. A cousin of an “embarrassment of riches.” The non-embarrassment of wishes.
I had a free day in New York the other day, and I spent a lot of it at MOMA. Here is the Yoko Ono wishing tree.
Both times I wrote about getting a book
published. The first was a wish.
The second one was thanks.
I think a lot of people miss that Ms. Ono has arranged to collect the wishes and hold them for safe keeping in a box on display, upstairs in the museum’s galleries. Something cast in ephemera and some sort of deliberate whimsy, that lands in a box called Art for all to see. Maybe that is the definition of the term.
