Kino Lorber has acquired North American rights to “Daytime Revolution,” a documentary about the week that John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted “The Mike Douglas Show” in early 1972. Directed by Erik Nelson, with creative consultation from Ono and her son, Sean Ono Lennon, the doc uses archival footage from each of the five 70-minute shows as well as interviews with six surviving guests, including Ralph Nader, to tell the behind-the-scenes story of theses shows.

UNICEF celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child with a concert, featuring performers from around the world, at the UN General Assembly on Thursday. Yoko Ono, Hugh Jackman, Steve Harvey and a slew of other celebrities were on hand for the musical celebration and to help launch the organization's new #IMAGINE campaign. [...] "All children everywhere have the same rights -- no matter where they or what they believe," Jackman remarked before bringing Yoko Ono on stage. Ono, who gave UNICEF the rights to use Lennon's song, seemed thrilled with the collaboration. Saying that the future was now, she urged everyone to "seek peace, act peace and spread peace."

Back in 1973, John Lennon and Yoko Ono founded an imaginary country, Nutopia. Launched to great fanfare at a press conference held at the New York City Bar Association in Midtown Manhattan, it was a reaction to Lennon's ongoing problems with the US immigration service, who were threatening to deport the former Beatles man back to the UK. […] "Anybody could be a citizen of this country," says Yoko Ono today. "Anybody could be a citizen of this country. Citizens were automatically the country’s ambassadors. The country’s body was the airfield of our joint thoughts. Its constitution was our love, and its spirit our dreams. We produced a white handkerchief from our pockets and said, “This is a flag to Surrender to Peace.” Not 'Fight for Peace’, but 'Surrender to Peace’ was the important bit." Well, now anyone can become a citizen of Nutopia. Last month the country was launched as a website, citizenofnutopia.com.

Yoko Ono: "Music of the Mind" (until 1st September, at the Tate Modern), is the U.K.’s largest exhibition of the artist’s work and forms part of a trend, brewing since the late 1990s, of vindication of a woman long vilified as the witch-like destroyer of the Beatles. Peter Jackson’s 2021 docuseries, Get Back, coincided with this broader move questioning the ways that Asian women have been depicted. (The first Yoko Ono album I ever owned was a 2007 collection of her songs remixed and reimagined by young DJs.) Ono was the first female philosophy student at Tokyo’s Gakushuin University, then studied poetry and musical composition at Sarah Lawrence, after moving to New York in 1953. Years before the Fab Four debuted on Ed Sullivan, she was a leading figure in Manhattan’s burgeoning avant-garde art scene, with a debut exhibition in July 1961 at AG Gallery, run by seminal Fluxus artist George Maciunas and gallerist Almus Salcius.

AFTER DECADES OF creating subversive art and music, Yoko Ono will receive a lifetime achievement award. MacDowell, an organization that offers artists residencies, will honor the artist with its Edward MacDowell Medal at an event in Peterborough, New Hampshire, this summer. [...] “It’s an incredible honor that my mother, Yoko Ono, will be awarded the MacDowell Medal,” her son Sean Ono Lennon, who recently won an Oscar for an animated short about his parents, said in a statement. “The history and list of past recipients is truly remarkable. It makes me very proud to see her art appreciated and celebrated in this way.”