As O+ wraps our 15th year, we reflect on all of the positive growth of the organization as well as the ways that our mission feels more important now than ever. As threats to healthcare have intensified – especially those who have long relied on Medicaid/Medicare, people living with disabilities or chronic conditions, those working in the gig economy and those who reapply for ACA coverage each year who now see their premiums double – O+ aims to be a part of the solution for our alumni and the broader community.
The O+ Exchange of the art of medicine for the medicine of art now operates year round. In June of 2025, we opened The O+ Exchange- a new homebase in Uptown Kingston. There we have built on the lessons of O+ 365’s pilot year in our previous space on St James St. and have expanded our art, literary and music events. We continued to grow our provider network and to navigate alumni to care. The space at 334 Wall St has allowed O+ to expand the availability of our mural tours, to grow our youth workforce development programs, leverage our space in support of our community partners and, importantly, to increase the access of our mission to the general public through open hours in a highly visible location.
We will continue to expand events, offerings, and services throughout 2026 to meet the needs of our community while strengthening the creative interconnectedness we rely on to be well. And we know that O+ cannot do this work without you. Whether you are an artist, a healthcare provider, business owner, volunteer, community partner, attendee, or a donor you are an essential contributor to the wellness access at the center of everything we do. In the year ahead, we encourage you to reach out, attend an event in our space, come to the annual O+ Festival, start a conversation about starting an O+ in your own community, offer a service, class or performance, share your work or volunteer. Thank you for your ongoing support of O+ and for being an essential part of keeping the arts alive in the Hudson Valley and beyond!
With LO+ve and gratitude,
Aimee, Alanna, Andrea, Dina, Jesse, Joe, Lara, Lauren, Lindsey, Liz and Mac
Exchanging Art & Music for Healthcare Since 2010
Exchanging Art & Music for Healthcare Since 2010
Treatments in Clinic
5750
Dental Treatments
500
THE O+ EXCHANGE @ 334 WALL ST
A New HO+mebase in Uptown Kingston
In June of 2025, we opened the doors of 334 Wall St to the public. Following a year of piloting programming in our space on St James St, the move onto the corner of Wall and N. Front Sts naturally enhanced and expanded what was possible.
The O+ Exchange in Uptown Kingston marks the first time in the organization’s history that we have a public-facing storefront with regular hours. Not only is the new space located in a more highly trafficked, commercial part of town but the visibility of the building itself is singular in the Stockade if not in all of Kingston. The number of folks who have walked in from the sidewalk and asked “What is O+?” has provided an opportunity to communicate our mission to a new audience, clarify our message and engage more members of the community in informative and moving conversations about the importance of health care access and the ways that art is essential to both individual and collective wellbeing.
75 Events @ 334 Wall St from June-December
1,222 Non-Festival exchanges with 576 individuals treated by 165 providers
53 One-on-one treatments provided/clinic visits (not during Festival)
Types of treatment offered: Primary Care, Talk Therapy, Massage, Acupuncture, Physical Therapy, Nutrition, Herbalism, Reiki, Breathwork, Psychedelic Integration, and more.
Workshops + Classes: Improv for Sanity, Glittercize, Psychedelic Integration 101, Tune In & Tune Up Community Yoga, QPR Suicide Prevention Training, and more.
Exhibitions, Film & Dance Performances in The O+ Exchange Gallery: Laura Coe with Liz Butowsky, Boogie Rez, Sophie Eisner, Beth Humphrey, Mark Hogancamp, two pop-up markets with the Blok Collective, video installation by Rooster, and a group show of 15 Hudson Valley artists as well as a screening of the documentary film Marwencol.
Literary Events & Artist Talks: Artist Talk from Rakel Stammer, Show & Tell 2nd Issue Release Party, Book Release Party for Before Superman w/ author/editor Joshua Glenn, Writing Salon w/ The Line Assembly, and more.
Performances/Events: Gravel Ride & Variety Show with comedy by AJ Jordan and music from Kyle McDonough, Album release party for Breakfast in Fur with Shana Falana, Kingston Pride, Dance Party with DJ Mr Chips, music from Chris Maxwell, John Burdick, Paisley Fields, Colton Thorn, Sarah Stamberg, Johanna Rose, Average Joey, and more.
Were a part of the chase brock experience. (Jane) I got a dentist appointment when we arrived because I am a freelance artist in NYC and I definitely don’t have dental insurance. So this was a really wonderful thorough dental cleaning and I was very grateful for the opportunity. (Miko) I also got a PT session this morning before the show. I have a rotator cuff injury so they took care of me really well so that I could be 100% on for the performance. And I (Kaleigh) was able to get a massage this morning and I really really appreciate all of the volunteers!
~ Miko, Jane and Kaliegh, O+ 2025 Alum
The O+ Team
Andrea Littleton, MD, Medical Director
Aimee Gardner, Operations
Joe Concra, Co-Founder/Partnerships
Lindsey Wolkowicz, Art Director
Mac Welch, Exchange/Outreach
Lara Hope, Music Director
Liz Paradise, Social Media
Lauren Fallon, Technical/Web
Alanna Coby, Grant Writer
Dina Kravtsov, NP, Clinic Consultant
Jesse Scherer, LMT, Festival Clinic & Provider Relations
The O+ Board
Craig Snyder, Chair
Jicky Schnee, Secretary
Don Johnson, Treasurer
Omari Washington
Lauren Aguiar
Joshua Leonard
Tracy Pollock
Pierre M. LaRamée
Diane Eber
Through the exchange of art and music for medicine, O+ empowers communities to take control of their collective well-being.
Since its inception in 2010, O+ has facilitated thousands of medical, dental, and wellness treatments for artists, musicians, and creatives. We do this work through a radical model that provides underinsured creatives access to healthcare in exchange for sharing their work with the public via the annual O+ Festival and through our year-round programming. We call this “exchanging the art of medicine for the medicine of art.”
In 2024, O+ established Medicine for Artists, PLLC in order to expand the model of exchange based healthcare that we had built for artists through the annual 3 day festival to 365 days a year. 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.
There is no other organization like O+ in the United States. Founded by artists, we focus on providing services for artists—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 create new structures and question the old, as well as our willingness to imagine that there is a different way forward. Now, after 15 years of working towards this mission, O+’s community of providers, artists, volunteers and partners continue to build a culture of care together.
This organization (O+) is providing such a great service to creatives, artists in this space. It’s free healthcare – dentists, doctor’s, masseuse‘s, tons of other resources. And this is my first time tapping in with them but it’s an honor and a pleasure. Just want to say thank you to the staff for welcoming us and taking care of us.
~ OSVN, 2025 O+ Festival Alum
Wellness
In the O+ Exchange Clinic, 2025 was spent growing the roster of providers offering care, enhancing the infrastructure of our exchange model and welcoming both a Nurse Practitioner and a new Medical Director to our team. While in-house primary care took a pause as we transitioned our MD and our location, we expanded year round care through off-site services provided by the over 400 providers now in our network.
2025 closed with Andrea Littleton, MD officially taking on the role of our new Medical Director after years of volunteering in the O+ Festival Artists’ Clinic. We are eternally grateful to Dr. Dre Edge for taking the leap with us to establish Medicine for Artists, PLLC two years ago and are excited to integrate Dr. Littleton’s commitment to wellness access and experience as a street medicine provider into our vision for the future of care through O+. Nurse Practitioner Dina Kravtsov, who has been working with O+ throughout 2025 to establish clinic operations in our new space, is also a multiyear alumni muralist and provider. She has been working with the Wellness Circle to establish new protocols for operation and to dream with the organization about how we can continue to grow capacity and offerings. We automated an online system for our alumni artists, providers and volunteers to be able to facilitate exchanges while minimizing extra steps and extra hands needed to keep those systems running. Through this system, members of the exchange are also helping us gather data to assist us in assessing the real needs of those we serve and identify new ways that we can connect folks open to exchanging for care.
We have created additional ways to expand our programming and outreach without being limited by humanpower. We have built forms for community members to submit their ideas for use of the space, workshops, pop-ups, conversations and more. We have established a system of alumni ID numbers, appointment codes and vouchers to empower alumni seeking care with everything they may need to claim exchange services available without waiting for O+ team members to mediate that experience. By automating some of the protocols around care, we are able to focus more intently on triage, building programming, and expanding the provider offerings to serve more of the health needs of our alumni and to continue to grow the services available to the general public.
As we look to 2026, we are inspired to see providers offering referrals to their offices, telehealth services, and becoming thought partners as we continue to build a culture of care in our community. We have added 300+ artist alumni to the year round exchange for healthcare in 2025 alone and hope to double that number of new alumni this year. We are thrilled to report that there are major programs in the works to expand our year round clinic reach to more communities throughout the Hudson Valley and beyond. We are focusing our energy in the new year on responsibly and radically expanding services, integrating the vision of our new lead doctor and her team and continuing to create dynamic programming at The O+ Exchange as new pathways for creatives to enter the exchange while providing our community with consistent, affordable access to the healing power of the arts.
The dentist was super awesome. He totally fixed my crown. It’s all good right there – used to have a big black hole. Fixed it real quick and did a bonus cleaning of my teeth. It hurt a lot but he was very nice. And he came to my show and he was super stoked. And I got massaged also. I mean how often do you get free healthcare in exchange for playing…. It would be great if one in ten festivals did that so you could stay all good. For me 10 out of 10 – not just for the services but for the vibe of the people.
~ Rushad Eggleston, 2025 O+ Festival Alum
Music
O+ Presents, A New Intimate Stage & Expanding Year Round Music
In 2025, the O+ music team advanced our mission by expanding both the scale and reach of our programming. At this year’s festival, we presented 57 bands—more than half of which were from the Hudson Valley—alongside comedians, highlighting our continued commitment to regional artists and the inclusion of diverse voices. From June to December, we produced live shows as a part of O+ Presents on our stage at 334 Wall St. These shows connected Hudson Valley musicians with artists from as far as New Orleans —with performances by Chris Maxwell, John Burdick, Paisley Fields, Johanna Rose, Breakfast In Fur, Colton Thorn, Sarah Stamberg, Kyle McDonough, DJ Mr. Chips and Shana Falana— while offering the public an intimate live show experience in our new space.
Beyond our own stages, the team produced the O+ Stage at Rosendale Street Fest and helped produce the Kingston Pride event, strengthening partnerships and increasing community visibility. Throughout the year, we continued to feature O+ bands and music we love on the O+ Radio Hour, further amplifying artist voices through our many platforms. We also moved our playlists off of Spotify, in solidarity with musicians everywhere, and encourage you to access our playlists now through Qobuz and discover O+ artists there through whatever streaming platform you use.
The O+ Festival was an incredibly dynamic musical experience with programming for everyone! Incredible, beloved acts as wide-ranging as the legendary Kool Keith, truth teller Rachael Yamagata, a reunion of The Fiery Furnaces, groove king Akie Bermiss, and heartland rockers Wild Pink graced nine different stages along with over 50 other musical performances. We returned to partnering venues during O+ Festival 2025 while establishing some new, instant favorites like our Misguided Stage at Snapper Magee’s. Comedy bookended the weekend as well with a showcase Friday night at Keegan Ales and rising star Charlene Kaye closing things out Sunday evening at Assembly.
In 2026, we look forward to increasing our year round music programming on the stage at The O+ Exchange in Uptown Kingston, creating more opportunities for musicians to play to local audiences but, most importantly, increased pathways into the healthcare exchange outside of the annual festival. We are also excited about the expansion of O+’s workforce development programs into the realm of music industry skill building and event production as yet another form of wellbeing made available through O+ programming. Stay tuned and keep listening!
Art
Art on Wall
The relocation of the O+ Exchange to the corner of Wall and N. Front Streets in Uptown Kingston has expedited growth of year-round arts programming at O+ in countless ways. The exhibition program not only points to the interdependence of art and wellness in our mission but also allows us to amplify the work of recent alumni while bringing new creatives into the ongoing exchange for care.
In 2025, O+ worked with the leadership and staff of the Pine Street Family Health Center to curate a collection of artwork representing the creativity and diversity of the local community. O+ worked to curate, frame, and install work, purchased directly from the artists, throughout the Health Center on Pine Street, activating each space with work to comfort and reflect the patients and providers who move through them each day. O+ and IFH marked the completion of this year-long project with an opening reception in June that brought artists, providers and the broader community together to celebrate the role that access to the arts plays in individual and community wellbeing.
The Art On Wall project, a program inspired by the architectural character of O+’s new space in Uptown Kingston, provides visibility literally and figuratively – for visual and performing art installations and activations. The glass storefront acts as a terrarium of sorts, where artwork of all forms can be presented and artists are challenged to respond to a container that is both highly public and structurally distinct. Inside of the larger interior space of 334 Wall St, a separate exhibition space now exists where art exhibitions are presented alongside the performance and wellness programming that happens within and around them.
Since we opened the Wall Street space in June 2025, we have already provided over two dozen artists with solo or group exhibitions and have invited dance, film, readings, artist talks and book/zine releases into the space. We have welcomed community partners to use the space for their own creative programming, ranging from pop-ups to conversations, group meetings to multimedia experiences. And the new O+ exam room just on the other side of the wall from this arts and event space acts as a powerful reminder that all these programs exist as pathways into our healthcare exchange.
The storefront at the heart of the Stockade district has also encouraged an expansion of the O+ Mural Tour Program. In recognition of public interest in the murals, and because of the curriculum O+ has developed over 10+ years of providing guided tours, we are now offering affordable public and private mural tours in Kingston, in addition to continued free tours for educational/youth groups. With this growth underway, we are cultivating new tour guides and program assistants at the O+ Exchange, through an expansion of O+’s Kingston Youth Voices by training young people that have participated in that program.
Kingston Youth Voices (KYV) is an arts education and paid apprenticeship program for local youth, ages 15-24, to develop the soft and hard skills through access to public art and arts education— the development of communication skills, boosted confidence, and heightened critical thinking skills are all proven takeaways from youth engagement with arts education. Apprentices join the program through O+ partner organizations, extending this opportunity to young people in our community with historically marginalized access to extracurricular arts experiences while ensuring they have a foundation of social and emotional support.
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 wellness of a community and its residents. Throughout the six-month program, apprentices explore the public art produced through O+ and choose a mural to reflect upon through written prompts, conversation and research. They dialog directly with their selected muralists and experience day trips to engage with some of those artists living in Kingston and beyond.
KYV apprentice reflections are recorded, in their own voices, with the support of Radio Kingston, and O+ works to edit that audio, along into podcast-like clips that will be shared with the public in the year ahead. Dedicated QR codes will be installed on the murals as access points to these reflections as well as the artist interviews conducted through the program. O+ is committed to continued development of audio content to expand self-guided engagement and enhanced accessibility for people with disabilities to all that the mural program has to offer. We are also building additional tools, visual descriptions, and Spanish-language content to ensure more equitable access to our mural program for all community members. These initiatives underscore O+’s focus on to not only expanding public accessibility to our programs, but also deepening the pathways to the empathy, representation, stories and wellbeing to be found therein.
PO+WER @ O+ Festival
Curation for O+ Festival weekend in recent years has been focused on not only responding thoughtfully to the year’s theme 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, multimedia performance, and film over the last few years. 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+ 2025 welcomed the movement vocabularies of choreographers and their dancers The Chase Brock Experience, Carin Jean White and Laura Coe with Liv Butowsky who each exhibited, through their distinct movement vocabularies, the unique capacity of dance to communicate the complexity of the human experience.
O+ Festival 2025 platformed multimedia performances from Kyle Turgeon and Daniel Djuro-Goiricelaya who each presented a powerful combination of video projection, live music performance and movement to express love and loss through lenses both personal and culturally informed. Two feature length documentary films were shown during the festival weekend that address the origins of politically charged art movements born out of subcultures rejecting the status quo. Beautiful Losers, presented at an outdoor screening with filmmakers Joshua Leonard and Aaron Rose in attendance, shows the impact of a movement of young people generating new forms through subversion, questioning and play. And Chile Estyle by Pablo Aravena, presented in partnership with Upstate Films, explores the history of political muralism that emerged in Chile in the late 60’s in reaction to an oppressive, violent government and the revolutionary street art that remains a primary tool of resistance in the culture today.
We are grateful to NYSCA, The Milton & Sally Avery Foundation, Arts Mid-Hudson and The John K & Elizabeth W Knorr Charitable Foundation for supporting the expansion of visual/performing arts and arts education programming in 2025/26 and the pathways to healthcare through the O+ exchange that are created for countless artists as a result.
Stay tuned for exhibition announcements, KYV updates, mural tours and more by following O+ on social media. Be sure to visit the O+ BLOG to learn more about O+ artists and their work.
Something like O+ – the O+ clinic and the festival itself – is almost like this incredible little miracle oasis for three days. To be able to come to the clinic and have acupuncture, to speak to nutritionists, to naturopaths, to have massage therapy…these things are very expensive on their own. It just feels like a humane way to share with each other, to help each other. I feel so blessed to be part of this community.
~ Gail Ann Dorsey, 2010/2023 alum
Partnerships
Our partners at O+ provide everything from paintbrushes for our muralists, to meals for our artists’ green room, refreshments at our events and wellness products, like Dr Bronner’s soap, for our volunteer providers. In fact, they even provide the stages themselves. WMC/Health Alliance of the Hudson Valley offered no cost health screenings for the public at the festival BlO+ck Party while providing funding to support our pop-up Artists’ clinic. And Underberg supported everyone’s digestion with their world famous elixir!
We have always relied on our neighbors and friends to provide the things that we don’t have the budget to afford –I mean we are an exchange after all– and these offerings also magnify the importance of interconnectedness and community spirit to individual and collective wellbeing. Through the estimated value of in-kind donations alone, our partners more than doubled our festival budget and multiply, immeasurably, the festival’s impact each year.
So from the tap takeover at Rough Draft year after year to our new partners at Snapper Magees, thank you. For the collaborations the festival inspires like the one between our beloved local breweries Keegan Ales, Blue Duck Brewing Company and Kingston Standard that resulted in the CO+llab beer, thank you. To Catskill Brewery, who may have brought their entire brewery with them to host O+Ktoberfest, to our NA partners Athletic Brewing, Industrial Arts and Al’s, cheers! Local eateries like Dallas Hot Weiners to Santa Fe to Deisings, Yum Yum Noodle and First Capital Poke showed up, yet again, to say “We are all in this together.” And businesses like Cut Teeth, Dynasty Brushes and Mustangs Bouldering, who feel connected to our work, generously offered their goods, services and support to our artists in ways that facilitated the sharing of their work and reinforced the overall sense of care that we strive to provide through our mission.
Since I’ve been here I stopped over and got a dental check up, stopped into the audiology office and got a hearing test done and, after 10 years of touring, it was great to check on that because I never had the opportunity to. So many of us shy away from it (healthcare) because we can’t afford it and the system that we have here (in the US) doesn’t create a baseline of accessibility to resources–so that you can survive and not lose all of your money because you got sick and had to go to the hospital or you need to get a checkup or you can’t afford healthcare or cant get certain services covered through Medicaid.
~ Joe of Joe’s Truck Stop, 2025 O+ Alum
2025 Festival Committee Members
Art
Reyna Martinez
Corrine Rodriguez
Saidee Sonnenberg
Dillon Paul
Adam Mastropaulo
Marielena Ferrer
w/ Lindsey Wolkowicz
ExplO+re Wellness
Theresa Widmann
Music
Lenny Bass
Maeve Schallert
Victor Lissabet
Suzanne Hilleary
w/ Lara Hope + Laura Crimmins
WO+rd
Carolita Johnson
Cristopher Livecchi
At the heart of the O+ Festival is the Clinic for Artists and Volunteers
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. Click here for a full list of O+ clinic providers.
2025 O+ Festival Clinic Team
Jesse Scherer, LMT, Clinic Coordinator
Kerry LaSalvia, RN
Andy Monk, Tech Coordinator
2025 O+ Festival Production Team
Diane Reeder, Greenroom
Max Fass, Volunteers
Michael Marino, BlO+ck Party
Hannah Greve, Front of House
Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy, Ticketing
My Kingston Kids, Parade
Sarah Dukler, Cycling
Suzanne Hilleary, Artist Liaison
Seeing artists actually get medical help and spiritual health, and mental health help and massages and reiki, it’s really incredible… I hope this is a direction in which the world is moving in general. Thank God for O+.
~ 2024 alum Rhett Miller
Liabilities & Net Assets | Total |
Total Liabilities | $9,403.00 |
|---|---|
Net Assets | $890,129.77 |
Net Assets less Liabilities | $880,726.77 |