Yoko Ono:
WATER EVENT

As part of the exhibition GROWING FREEDOM: The instructions of Yoko Ono and The art of John and Yoko, on view from October 9, 2021, until May 1, 2022, the Vancouver Art Gallery will be showing an iteration of Yoko Ono’s instruction work, WATER EVENT (1971/2021).

For this project, Ono invites a number of artists to create, or select, a container that can hold water. The work was initially presented in Ono’s first museum exhibition at the Emerson Museum in Syracuse, New York, in 1971, when she invited 120 artists and musicians to participate.

For the iteration at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Ono has requested to work with local Indigenous artists to reflect the significance of water to these local communities, past and present, and to create specificity in the work that acknowledges and amplifies the Indigenous communities on whose land the Gallery resides.

Invited artists:

Orene Askew
Leigh Joseph and Floyd Joseph
Diamond Point
Chrystal Sparrow and Chris Sparrow
Debra Sparrow
Manuel Axel Strain
Sesemiya/Tracy Williams