Wish Tree (Yoko Ono art series)

Wish Tree is an ongoing art installation series by Japanese artist Yoko Ono, started in 1996,^[1] in which a tree native to a site is planted under her direction. Viewers are usually invited to tie a written wish to the tree except during the winter months when a tree can be more vulnerable. Locations of the piece have included New York City, St. Louis, Wish Tree for Washington, DC, San Francisco, Pasadena, and Palo Alto, California, Tokyo, Venice, Paris, Dublin, London, Exeter, England, Finland and Buenos Aires, Argentina, Calgary.

Her 1996 Wish Piece had the following instructions:

Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree. Ask your friends to do the same. Keep wishing. Until the branches are covered with wishes.^[2]

Installations have involved from one to 21 trees, and varieties include lemon trees, eucalyptus, and crepe myrtles. To honor wish writers' privacy, Ono claims she does not read the wishes, and collects them all to be buried at the base of the Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island in Kollafjörður Bay in Iceland.^[1] To date over 1 million wishes have been buried beneath the tower.

History

The series developed after an installation of one tree in Finland grew into a mini-forest, and Ono felt a continuing social need. She has also said:

As a child in Japan, I used to go to a temple and write out a wish on a piece of thin paper and tie it around the branch of a tree. Trees in temple courtyards were always filled with people's wish knots, which looked like white flowers blossoming from afar.^[1]

In fall 2010, Ono performed Voice Piece for Soprano, near the MoMA rendition of the piece as part of the museum's collections show.^[3] Musician Pharrell Williams wrote on one in New York in 2013.^[4]

Locations

Year	City or country	Institution or group, if known	Title, if known	Tree type, if known	Other
Before 1996	Finland^[1]
1996	Alicante, Valencia, Spain^[5]			pomegranate^[6]^{[incomplete short citation]}
2002	San Francisco^[7]	SFMoMA
2002	Exeter, England^[8]
2003	Venice, Italy	Peggy Guggenheim Collection	Wish Tree Venice 2003. To Peggy with Love x Yoko	olive tree^[9]	Permanent installation
2007	Washington, DC	Hirshhorn Museum gardens	Wish Tree for Washington, DC	dogwood^[10]
2007	São Paulo^[8]
2008	Pasadena, California	One Colorado shopping center	Wish Tree for Pasadena	21 crepe myrtle trees	Permanently installed at Arlington Garden, Pasadena
2009	Palo Alto, California	Stanford University campus		two lemon trees^[11]
2009	Tokyo^[8]
2010	New York City^[4]	MoMA
2010	Oberlin, Ohio^[8]	Oberlin College
2012	New York City	Occupy Wall Street (Zuccotti Park)	Wish Tree for Zuccotti Park		Project altered to distribution of 10,000 postcards after fall 2011 police raid of park^[12]
	Dublin		Wish Tree for Ireland^[13]
	London	Serpentine Galleries	Wish Tree for London
2012-13	Brooklyn, New York^[14]	Brooklyn Museum
2013	St. Louis^[15]	Saint Louis Art Museum
2013	Sydney, Australia	Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney	Wish Tree for Sydney^[16]	six eucalyptus^[17]
2014	Orlando^[18] and Tampa, Florida^[19]	Hard Rock Cafe locations
2016	Manhattan Beach, California	Manhattan Beach Art Center	Wish Tree for Manhattan Beach	unknown	Temporary installation
2016	Buenos Aires, Argentina	MALBA			Part of Yoko Ono retrospective
2018	New York City	Performa 17		unknown	Temporarily installed at festival headquarters^[20]
2019	Bad Homburg vor der Höhe	Blickachsen	Wish Trees for Bad Homburg^[21]	apple tree^[21]