In 2007, Ono gifted a dogwood tree, titled 'Wish Tree for Washington, D.C.’ , to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. The tree is part of Yoko Ono’s worldwide, ongoing ‘Wish Tree’ art installation series.
The Hirshhorn has opened ‘Wish Tree’ as an interactive on-site installation every summer. Visitors are encouraged to write wishes on paper tags and tie them to the tree’s branches, making it “bloom” with wishes.
The staff ‘harvests’ the wishes throughout the summer, and sends them to join more than 1 million others on Videy Island in Reykjavik, Iceland. They are buried at the foot of Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace Tower, a column of geothermally powered light, a memorial to her late husband, John Lennon.
The Hirshhorn’s tree has collected more than 100,000 wishes in the past decade. Now through April 30, 'Wish Tree' will be open virtually. Everyone is invited to share photographs of their handwritten wishes with the museum via IInstagram under the hashtags #WishTreeDC and #YokoOno. The staff will then transfer as many wishes as possible to paper tags. As always, the wishes will be sent to Iceland at the end of the season. You can find the deets here.
What will you wish for?
Maybe … the return of live concert venues... and world peace.
