Throughout 2024, we have been ramping up our year-round programming of art, music, and wellness from three days a year at the festival to 365 days a year at O+’s new exchange-based health and wellness clinic.Under the leadership of Dr. Lizette Edge and our Wellness Team, the O+ Exchange Clinic has steadily expanded its services over the last 12 months. We can now offer regular access to primary care, physical therapy, nutrition counseling, mental health resources, complementary care, harm reduction, and more, with additional pathways toward wellness being developed every month.
In the last six months alone, O+ has facilitated over 100 exchanges between artists and providers, and we are working to expand our resources to better serve the local community as a whole with every step. While our year-round work and new programs expanded throughout 2024, the beloved annual festival returned in October for one of the most successful O+ Fests to date!
As we continue to build the year-round model through The O+ Exchange Clinic, we remain focused on our mission to provide essential healthcare services to artists while establishing partnerships and initiatives to support wellness, in all of its forms. We are committed to building upon the lessons and successes of 2024 and, with your support, to continue cultivating a culture of care in Kingston and throughout the Hudson Valley.
With LO+ve and gratitude,
Aimee, Alanna, Dave, Dre, Jesse, Joe, Lara, Laura, Lauren, Lindsey, and Mac
Exchanging Art & Music for Healthcare Since 2010
Exchanging Art & Music for Healthcare Since 2010
The O+ Team
Dr. Lizette Edge MD, Wellness/Clinician
Aimee Gardner, Operations
Lindsey Wolkowicz, Art Director
Joe Concra, Co-Founder/Partnerships
Mac Welch, Outreach/Communication
Laura Crimmins, Production Director
Lauren Fallon, Technical/Web
Jesse Scherer, LMT, Clinic Coordinator
Lara Hope, Music Programming
Dave Green, National Partnerships
Alanna Coby, Development
The O+ Board
Craig Snyder, Chair
Jicky Schnee, Secretary
Don Johnson, Treasurer
Omari Washington
Maggie Carpenter, MD
Diane Eber
Tracy Pollock
Pierre M. LaRam
Since its inception in 2010, O+ (pronounced “O Positive”) has facilitated thousands of medical, dental, and wellness treatments for artists. We do this work through a radical model that provides underinsured artists access to healthcare in exchange for sharing their work with the public via the annual O+ Festival or our year-round programming. We call this “exchanging the art of medicine for the medicine of art.”
There is no other organization like O+ in the United States. Founded by artists, we focus on providing services for artists because we are an intersectional group by definition: people across the spectrum of age, socioeconomic status, gender, sexuality, and race. What unites us as a group is an openness to experimentation, the ability to build new structures and question old ones, and our willingness to imagine that there is a different way forward for our communities.
We believe that equitable access to art and healthcare in our communities is essential to individual and collective wellness. We all know that the healthcare system in America is broken. So we are building a new one.
MISSION
Through the exchange of art and music for medicine, O+ empowers communities to take control of their collective well-being.
VISION
When artists and musicians thrive, so do culture and our communities. The O+ Exchange model is a system of care wherein an individual’s value is based on their contribution to the collective, and everyone has equitable access to art and medicine.
~ 2010/2023 Alum Gail Ann Dorsey
Wellness
THE DO+CTOR IS IN
Year One @ The Exchange Clinic
Our first primary care appointment in the O+ Exchange Clinic took place on February 12th, 2024. During the first months of the year, a focus group of art, music, and wellness alumni gathered to brainstorm, test methods, and share needs and offerings to help us pilot the O+ Exchange Clinic’s functionality in a year-round model. These first exchanges offered enormous insight as we worked to automate processes and gather data to support the growth of the system with consistency and continuity of care at the center. As we continue to scale up both the services available in the clinic and the number of alumni registered into the year-round exchange we are simultaneously finding ways to extend those services to the general public whenever possible.
O+ EXCHANGE CLINIC
YEAR ONE of YEAR-ROUND CARE BY THE NUMBERS
- 25 Primary Care visits
- 24 Care Modality Appointments
WORKSHOPS
39 total, including: Music Writing and Promotion Workshops, Clothing Swap & Repair Workshops, Group Therapy Series, Psychedelic Integration Therapy Series, QiGong Series, Knitting 101, Trans Health, and lectures on topics like Nutrition and Tick-Borne Diseases.
2024 Exhibitions in the Clinic Gallery: Ben Eichert, Carmen Lizardo, Jennifer Zackin, David Najib Kasir, Singha Hon, and Sophie Eisner with performances by Benedict Kupstas
Performances/Events: Acapella Group Singing, Sunday Service Variety Show with comedy curated by AJ Jordan and Music by J.K. Vanderbilt and Open Head, Extraordinary Podcast Launch Party, Pride Alley with Sexual Health Jeopardy, Queer Trivia and Zine Making offered by Hudson Valley LGBTQ Center
Art
Amplifying Kingston Youth Voices + Expanding Programming
With the inaugural year of the O+ Exchange Clinic came an opportunity for O+ to curate exhibitions—off-festival and in our own space—for the first time in the organization’s history. The exhibition program not only imbued our clinic space with a sense of the interconnectedness of art and medicine in our mission, but also allowed us to amplify the work of recent alumni.
The first year of exhibitions highlighted work from O+ artists, many of whom are known in Kingston for their public artworks, and offered them a solo show within which they could share other aspects of their practice and offer deeper insight into their ideas. Exhibitions in The O+ Exchange Gallery included work from Ben Eichert, Carmen Lizardo, Jennifer Zackin, David Najib Kasir, Singha Hon, and Sophie Eisner. Stay tuned for exhibition announcements for 2025 and visit the BLOG page on opositivefestival.org to learn more about these past exhibitions in our clinic space.
Art curation at the O+ Festival in recent years has been focused on not only growing our mural program with intention but also expanding representation of all mediums, modalities, and practices of art making. We are proud of the emphasis we have placed on including more dance and film/video, especially since the festival returned post-2020’s Covid pause. This year’s O+ Festival offered stunning examples of expertise in these fields and demonstrated the impact these art forms can have on the festival experience. O+ 2024 welcomed internationally renowned choreographers and their dancers—Stephen Pelton Dance Theater and InkBoat—both with ties to the region, who exhibited, through their movement vocabularies, the vast language of dance. We have continued to grow the WO+rd literary programming which was dedicated to a integral storyteller in our community who passed just a few months earlier, Julie Novak. We are also proud of the ongoing expansion of dance and film/video, especially since the festival returned post-2020’s Covid pause.
Drawing on the 2024 festival theme of NOISE for this year’s curatorial framework, projected images and sound dominated the program, tackling issues like opioid addiction in a performance by Kerosene Jones, and offering attendees opportunities to participate in work being made on-site as in the community-based work of Carmen Lizardo and Tona Wilson.
In 2024, O+ offered vastly different films and filmmaker conversations on Saturday and Sunday nights. New York-based filmmaker Emily Packer and her team were in attendance for a screening and Q&A of their documentary Holding Back the Tide about oysters and their role in the health of New York’s waterways, presented through a queer lens, at the Hudson Valley LGBTQ Center. The festival closed with a 25th anniversary screening of The Blair Witch Project at The Old Dutch Church, co-presented by Upstate Films and Woodstock Film Festival. Not only was it a singular experience to watch this groundbreaking film in the sanctuary of ODC, but we were honored to be joined by cast members Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams, as well as director Ed Sánchez, for a panel discussion moderated by actor Amanda Seyfried.
Every year, O+ brings new murals to the streets of Kingston and as of Fall 2024, there are 65 O+ murals in the city of Kingston alone. We believe that art is medicine and that encountering art in public spaces provides equitable access to the arts that creates joy, conversation, and critical engagement. To ensure that the murals developed with O+ remain relevant and accessible, we stock free, easy-to-read mural maps of all the O+ murals at a dozen outdoor pick-up locations at partner organizations and businesses in Kingston. These mural maps provide information for self-guided tours to visitors and the general public and are used in walking and cycling mural tours hosted by O+ as well as by educators, community leaders, and families throughout the year to deepen their understanding of the murals, the artists who made them, why public art is important, and the mission that drives O+’s work.
With the support of the Institute for Family Health, O+ now has a Spanish-language version of the new mural map! We partnered with Kingston resident and first-language Spanish speaker Alejandra Martinez who provided thoughtful translations of the content of the first O+ Mapa Mural de Kingston in nearly 8 years. In 2025, O+ will add second boxes to some of the current map pick-up locations, providing English and Spanish versions to the public, as well as adding 6-10 NEW pick-up locations specifically designated for the Spanish language version of the map. As always, the mural maps are free and available for pick up outdoors, in watertight plexi cases that allow folks to identify them from afar and take them at their leisure. We hope these maps will significantly expand the impact and understanding of the O+ mural program.
We also invested in developing audio content for the Kingston murals through collaborations and partnerships with organizations, wellness practitioners, and musicians in the community. The audio created for O+’s murals includes information about the subject of the murals, their inspiration, the artist’s voices and intentions for the piece, O+’s reason for curating the work into our collection, and the cultural context, whether based in history, activism, ecology, politics, identity or current affairs, that the mural is in conversation with.
In keeping with this commitment to expanding access to the arts, we’ve also extended our youth education and training programming. O+ created Kingston Youth Voices (KYV) in 2023 to deepen our engagement with the local arts community and continued to build on the program in 2024.
KYV is an arts education and paid apprenticeship program for local youth, ages 15-24, to develop the soft and hard skills that come out of access to public art and arts education—better-developed communication skills, boosted confidence, and heightened critical thinking skills are all proven takeaways from youth engagement with arts education. All KYV apprentices come to O+ via partner organizations like The DRAW, extending this opportunity to young people in our community with historically marginalized access to extracurricular arts experiences while also ensuring that they have additional social and emotional well-being support.
Pop Up Gallery Group (PUGG), the workforce development program of The DRAW in Midtown Kingston, gives young people equitable access to many kinds of arts education but does not specifically emphasize murals or public art, so Kingston Youth Voices is a unique offering that O+ provides. We are thrilled that our close relationship with PUGG means that we can offer this paid youth development opportunity to a community of diverse young people who too often face barriers to entry in the fields of fine arts and arts administration/production while also being able to invite the voices and perspectives of young members of our community into O+’s public art program.
The members of KYV attend workshops with O+ staff where they learn the ins and outs of mural production, critically engage with the content of existing O+ murals, and explore how public art can impact the overall health of individuals and the wellness of a community. Throughout the year-long pilot (July 2023 – July 2024), apprentices explored the murals O+ has brought to their community and chose a mural to write and reflect upon. They also had the opportunity to dialog with their selected muralists as a group, asking them about their intentions and process, and capped their experience off with a studio visit with an O+ Alum muralist at their residency program in the World Trade Center in New York City in the winter of 2024.
Following a peer editing and feedback process, their reflections were recorded with the support of Radio Kingston, the local community radio station. Throughout the second half of 2024, O+ worked to edit their audio, along with the voices of the artists themselves, into podcast-like clips that will be shared with the public in 2025. This audio content will be available through our website and accessible through dedicated QR codes that will be installed on the murals during the calendar year ahead. In addition to offering insight into the murals and their makers, O+ is committed to the continued development of audio content to expand remote, year-round engagement, self-guided enjoyment of the artwork, and enhanced access for people with disabilities. We are also committed to building additional tools, visual descriptions, and Spanish-language audio content to ensure that all community members have access to our mural program.
These initiatives underscore O+’s commitment to not only expanding public accessibility to the artwork, but also deepening the pathways to understanding, empathy, and representation to be found therein.
Music
O+ Presents Music Year Round + Building Partnerships
We kicked off 2024 with a performance series called HuttO+n Hangouts at the historic Edgewood Mansion, featuring everything from piano lounge and country to drag performances and comedy to brighten the darker months of winter.
The spring welcomed Grammy Award-winning Allison Russell and O+ Alum Denitia to The Old Dutch Church for the O+365 Benefit to support our year-round exchange clinic. Allison’s thoughtfulness and dedication, in addition to her incredible voice and her phenomenal Rainbow Coalition Band, created an unforgettable evening for O+ supporters.
O+ was honored to be asked again to program and produce the stage at Kingston’s second annual Pride Alley in June, this time in conjunction with long-time and new partners Keegan Ales and Camp Kingston on the site of our year-round exchange clinic in Kingston. The new O+ Exchange Clinic also offered an exciting space for more intimate music events such as songwriting, singing, and music business workshops, as well as collaborative events like Sunday Service, featuring comedians and live bands curated specifically for service workers who usually need to work shows on weekends rather than be able to attend as fans.
It was another record year at the 2024 O+ Festival in October with over 5000 attendees, thanks in large part to the legendary Neko Case headlining the Old Dutch Church Friday night, and Rhett Miller (Old 97s) and rock icon Kate Pierson (B-52’s) packing the church Saturday. We were also thrilled to bring back the Stockade Tavern as an O+ Festival venue for a wildly successful CO+medy Night and to collaborate with the new midtown space Unicorn Bar for evenings of intimate jazz and songwriting centered around LGBTQ+ artists. Thanks to fantastic weather, we were able to fill Wall Street in Uptown Kingston with vendors, community partners, public preventative healthcare services, a solar stage, and dancing at the BlO+ck Party, a reimagining of the festival’s health and wellness ExpO+.
O+ Festival 2024 highlights also included an eclectic night, with everything from honky tonk to Cumbia, that got people dancing at our outdoor SO+mewhere Stage. There was a packed hip hop night at Tubby’s, an intimate singer/songwriter stage at Utility Bicycle Works, a multi-sensory electronic light show in the legendary Keegan Ales tank room, and our beloved closing party, hosted this year by Unicorn Bar, complete with a birthday cake for O+ as it turned 14 years old.
14 YEARS OF O+ FESTIVAL
Celebrating art, music, and wellness. Connecting artists to care.
Making a joyful noise with our community.
We partnered with Owley Studios to capture the 2024 O+ Festival through the eyes of volunteers, providers, and alumni as they experience the mission of O+ firsthand.
~ O+ Festival Charge Nurse Kerri LaSalvia, RN
ART:
Michael Torres
Saidee Sonnenberg
Dillon Paul
Adam Mastropaulo
Marielena Ferrer
w/Lindsey Wolkowicz
WO+RD:
Carolita Johnson
Cristopher Livecchi
MUSIC:
Allie Young
callie mackenzie
Mac Welch
Max Fass
Suzanne Hilleary
w/Lara Hope and Laura Crimmins
EXPLO+RE WELLNESS:
Theresa Widmann
Thank you to the members of the Wellness Team who contribute to the success of the O+ Festival Artist Clinic and who are essential to the ongoing expansion of O+ wellness services all year round through the O+ Exchange Clinic.
Our deepest gratitude to all of the practitioners volunteering in the Artist Clinic this year! And a special thank you to The Institute of Family Health for their residents and support. Please see the O+ website for a full list of clinic providers.
Dr. Lizette Edge, Wellness/Clinician
Jesse Scherer, LMT, Wellness/Clinic Coordinator
Kerry LaSalvia, RN
Andy Monk, Tech Coordinator
2024 O+ Festival Production Team:
Diane Reeder, Greenroom
Max Fass, Volunteers Coordinator
Michael Marino, BlO+ck Party
Hannah Greve, Front of House
Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy, Ticketing
Francesa Hoffman, Parade Coordinator
Sarah Dukler, Cycling
Suzanne Hilleary, Artist Liaison
~ 2024 Alum Rhett Miller
Liabilities & Net Assets | Total |
Total Liabilities | $9,059.77 |
|---|---|
Net Assets | $665,119.99 |
Net Assets less Liabilities | $656,060.22 |