Always wanted to have one of your original designs on the much sought after O+ Merch Collection? Wait no further, we’re having a Design CO+ntest! Channel that O+ energy and LO+VE and send us what you come up with. First Prize will include a visit to the Festival Clinic and TWO+ weekend Festival passes. Any and all chosen runners-up will get a Festival Weekend pass. Of course, you will also be able to enjoy the festival in pride seeing your design sitting below all the happy Festival-goer faces.
Email designs to info@opositivefestival.org. We prefer to receive them in vector format, Illustrator ideally. If that’s not possible, please send high resolution (600DPI) Photoshop files or JPEGs.
National Charity Revitalizes Communities Through Weekend-Long Wellness, Music & Art Events.
Kingston, N.Y.–O+ Festival, which is dedicated to the exchange of health and wellness services for works of art and musical performances, is now a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The new tax-exempt status, granted by the IRS, is vital to the Festival’s future impact, says Joe Concra, executive director of O+.
“O+ would like to thank every Artist, Musician, Wellness Provider, Business Owner, Festival Goer and the hundreds of volunteers who make it happen,” Concra says. “Achieving our 501(c)(3) means that your donation is now tax deductible and will provide the foundation for O+ to grow from New York’s Hudson Valley to California and beyond.”
Chapters of O+, which was founded in Kingston, N.Y. in 2010, host weekend-long annual art and music events during which participating artists and musicians exhibit their talents in exchange for access to health and wellness services from art-loving, health care professionals.
The Festival has plans to open a year-round multi-use facility to provide artists and musicians with complementary care services, wellness education, and other preventative care options. In addition, the new space will function as a location for ongoing support of art and music activities.
“The goal here is wellness. Not only the physical, mental and emotional wellness of artists and musicians, but the overall wellness of community,” says Theresa Widmann, director of operations for the Festival. “We want to continue to be a part of the growth of the communities we serve by developing employment opportunities both internally and externally. There is a very clear shift taking place, where local and sustainable are becoming the priority. This is how we can make meaningful change in the lives of our neighbors.”
The first O+ Festival brought together 100 artists and musicians, 48 healthcare providers, 30 volunteers and one amazing dentist. O+ attendees who paid $25 received a red hospital wristband good for three days of art and music. Those that couldn’t afford the admission were asked to make some kind of donation. Organizers were amazed at response from the crowds, which numbered more than 1,000. Everyone had a great time and a lot of uninsured or under-insured artists and musicians got the health and wellness care they needed and deserved, and were appreciated for the cultural contribution they were making to the area. The providers, who cared for the members of the creative community during the festival, told organizers about the satisfaction they felt knowing they had changed lives. And as a bonus they got to experience performances and view artworks.
In 2013, the festival launched O+ San Francisco. In the two cities combined the non-profit has provided more than 1,470 clinic visits and hosted 195 artists, including internationally renowned street artist/muralist, Gaia, and performance artist Linda Montano, and 210 bands, including Lucius and Spiritualized. O+ has attracted 350 volunteers and more than 250 wellness and health providers, not to mention 271 dental appointments by six dentists. Of course, all of the musicians call out the providers at every festival and say they are the real rockstars. Thousands of people have attended O+ Festivals, donating what they can to the cause.
The next O+ Festival in Kingston takes place Oct. 10, 11 and 12, 2014.
Mural by LMNOPi for Kingston O+ 2013 on an exterior wall of Keegan Ales, Kingston, NY
During the three day, fourth-annual, O+ Festival, 40 bands & 40 artists received 99 dental appointments & 350 hours of health & wellness exams in exchange for sharing their performances & artworks with over 2000 festival attendees. Steeped in dozens of wellness offerings of all kinds, uptown Kingston thrived & businesses had their busiest weekend of the year. < h6 >By the end of the weekend well over $100,000 worth of Art, Music and Health were exchanged to strengthen and enrich the Uptown Kingston community and the entire Hudson Valley.
O+ writer Paul Austin brings us up to speed on O+’s flagship event, now entering its fifth year..
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If Joe Concra could go back in time to 2010 and give himself one piece of advice as the first O+ festival started, what would it be?
“…now I know that it is a rising sun.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Enjoy the ride. Hang on; this is going to be amazing. You never know, day to day, what’s going to come at O+ and what O+ is going to do,” says the co-founder and executive director of the O+ Festival in Kingston.
It has been an amazing ride: 1470 wellness clinic visits, 210 bands, 195 artists, 250 health care providers, 15 days of festival time and two cities later, O+ is poised to keep on expanding. 2013 was the first year O+ branched out into another city – San Francisco witnessed their first O+ festival in November, a month after Kingston held its fourth – and this only the beginning.
As all this happened, O+ distinguished itself among festivals. It is not about just wellness, music, or art; it’s about all three. Together, those three parts make a whole greater than their sum: O+ is about building and revitalizing community.
In expanding to its second home city, the O+ festival provided a whole new group of people a chance to take the ride of which Joe speaks. Misty Rushing, Clinic Director for the festival in San Francisco, heard about and was hired on to do the job a mere two months prior to the festival taking place. “There was an element of magic, it seemed, how things just kind of came together at the right time,” says Misty. “There were a lot of balls in the air and moving parts that made it very stressful but equally exciting.”
Preparations for the O+ kick-off parade
Come together it did. Amy Gardner, one of Misty’s two co-producers in helming the festival out west, came to the Kingston festival the month before San Francisco kicked off. She said she knew things were good in San Francisco when she, “saw the same vibe and energy and great buzz that [she] saw in Kingston.”
Deb Gatiss, the third of the festival co-producers in SF, agrees. “I look at the festival as a huge success, despite the exhaustion, despite all of the things I wish we could have done,” adding, “I absolutely would recommend to anyone else to do it, and I’ll help in any way that I can.”
The trio is far from Pollyanna-ish about the experience, however. They know the difficulties they faced this year and are keen to correct and make it better next year – so that means yes, there will be another O+ Festival in the bay area next year. “It seems that the town [of Kingston] is really behind the idea/festival and willing to help. Our city of SF has elements of that, but also some big barriers, primarily legal and monetary in nature. The difference between having town support and having big city red flags is something to be addressed,” says Deb. So, Deb keeps two lists: “O+SF things that worked” and “O+SF things to work on.” Chief among the changes for next year are more fundraising and getting started earlier.
The Felice Brothers perform at the Old Dutch Church, O+ Kingston, 2013
The same is true for Kingston. Brandy Walters, a member of the Kingston O+ team that visited O+ San Francisco, said, “I think it went great for the first time out! There is room for improvement, but after four years we in Kingston have room for growth as well. It’s never a finished product and that’s part of the beauty. This festival will continue to grow and evolve to meet the current climate’s needs.”
Joe hints that the submission process for bands and artists will start much earlier and, among other things, says he needs to grow his staff and give them more responsibilities so he can move on to finding more big sponsors, like Lagunitas, Keegan Ales, and Topricin. Joe had special praise for Lagunitas: “They made all the T-shirts for San Francisco and did not put their name on them. They get it.”
O+ revelers passing the O+ Pop-Up Clinic
In addition to beefing up staff, schedule and fundraising, O+ seeks to spread to more cities in 2014. What town will be next will be influenced by how O+ feels they can make a difference in the community. “It’s about neighborhoods, it’s about community,” says Joe. “Artists and musicians have decentralized from the [large] cities because of how expensive it is.” Regarding San Francisco, for example, Misty and others pointed out that being a bigger place that is used to many festivals, the town’s venues are often booked and it is hard to convince owners to offer their places to the festival if something more lucrative for them exists. In a town like Kingston, people are more apt to help out from their sense of community and desire to make a difference.
There are also plans to install a permanent clinic in cities that participate, and make the festivals celebrate the clinic. The health care providers and others in Kingston are behind it.
The desire to make a difference and build a community is at the heart of O+. “Building a community around O+ speaks to the simple idea of…compassion and being part of a community,” says Joe. Because we’ve become accustomed for so long on huge companies to provide everything we need, “on a health care and community level we’ve forgotten this. We forget to look at our neighbors to see what they can offer.”
Artist Kimberly Kay beautifies one of Kingston’s walls with a beautiful hand-painted mural.
In addition to the fourth annual festival in Kingston on the record books, 2013 also added a fifth in a city on the other side of the country. The experiences of both teams will inform future endeavors for O+ as a whole. The biggest thing to learn about San Francisco, says Joe, is that the idea took root there and they grew it the way they wanted to grow it for their community. That lesson, in addition to numerous logistical insights, will be added to a growing playbook for new cities to learn from. It has been a long but fulfilling ride for all involved. O+ has taken Joe, Misty, Amy, Deb, Brandy and many others to places they never expected – but for all, it feels right. It will be exciting to see what’s going to come at O+ and what O+ is going to do in 2014.
O+ Festival’s acting executive director Joe Concra took the stage on June 7, 2013 for O+’s third TEDx speaking engagement — TEDx Longdock in Beacon, New York. The theme of the day was Community, Collaboration and Sustainability – three of the core tenants of O+.
Thanks to Scott Tillitt for inviting O+ and to Rob Penner for editing the below video of Joe’s presentation.
The O+ Festival in San Francisco this weekend would seem a typical indie arts event, with performances by local musicians and displays of funky art. But in a twist that highlights a longstanding problem in the creative economy, the artists involved will be paid not in cash but rather in something they may need just as badly: health care.
The three-day festival, which began on Friday, pairs musicians and visual artists with doctors, dentists and other health advisers who donate their services through a pop-up clinic. Joe Concra, a painter who helped start the festival three years ago in Kingston, N.Y., describes the exchange of art for health treatment as a barter system that recalls a time before co-pays and H.M.O.’s.
“This goes back to, ‘Hey, doc, my tooth hurts; here’s a chicken,’ ” Mr. Concra said. The festival estimates that about $100,000 worth of music, art and health services were exchanged at the most recent edition, in Kingston last month. (It expanded to San Francisco for the first time this year.) Read more at nytimes.com
Volunteer care providers serving O+’s Pop-Up Clinic, Kingston NY 2012.
A festival where uninsured artists and musicians exchange work for medical attention is attracting interest from organizers and physicians across the country looking to replicate the model
Jason Russo, a 37-year-old singer and guitarist from Brooklyn, hasn’t had consistent health care since he was a teenager. In October he saw a doctor—though in an unconventional setting: a gig in Kingston, N.Y., 90 miles north of New York City. Russo was one of 70 musicians and artists who bartered their creative services for medical care at an event called the O+ Festival. “It was kind of an amazing thing to sit down with a regular doctor,” he says. “Doctors are humans, it turns out. They enjoy rock music and art.”
A group of artists and physicians in the Hudson Valley conceived of the gathering. About 40 doctors, dentists, physical therapists, acupuncturists, and others donated 232 hours of service, valued at more than $38,000, to the bands and artists who played or created sculptures or paintings. “It really is about … helping artists and musicians who are contributing to society find health care at affordable rates,” says Arthur Chandler, a doctor at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson, N.Y., and an organizer of O+ (pronounced O-positive). Read more in Bloomberg Businessweek
Internationally known street artist Gaia joined us for 2013’s Kingston, NY O+ Festival, ambitiously taking on one of the city’s largest wall spaces for an eight-story original mural. Watch an artist profile produced by StudiO+, replete with time-lapse video of this awe-inspiring, one-man installation:
Gaia’s latest works endeavor to, “…remind us of lost human connections to nature and the environment.” About the mural Gaia designed for Kingston, he says, “The piece features the Greek goddess Artemis from a photo I took at the Vatican descending into a gaping limestone quarry with a skyline of New York City on the horizon and a Corinthian crown at the top. This piece goes in three directions: 1) A reference to Kingston’s proximity to natural resources that helped build New York City; 2) the process of resource exploitation as a defiling of the Mother Earth; 3) marble and limestone used for architectural embellishments in early Neo classical revival / Georgian American architecture, the statue not only representing Mother Earth but also is a Hellenistic and roman reference as a celebration of democracy in early United States history. This is further suggested with the Corinthian column.”
Gaia not only created this magnificent painting in a single week, but he also cashed in with some extremely valuable dental work thanks to our dental volunteers. Read more about this mural on Brooklyn Street Art.
The finished mural. Photo by Andy MilfordGaia surveying his work. Photo by Andy Milford
An exclusive StudiO+ appearance by Richard Buckner
Richard Buckner’s most recent record, Surrounded (2013, Merge Records), is his tenth full-length in a legacy dating back just shy of two decades. During that span, he’s stirred a substantial cult following of heartened fans — nearly spiritual about his music — whispering of him accolades like “greatest living songwriter.”
Some claim that his style defies categorization, in a gesture of reverence, but Pitchfork and NPR agree on an outsider-country parallel to Townes Van Zandt. Others posit a Dylan who managed to evolve favorably with the times, or a Jeff Buckley who’d hung in there.
He’s a hard man to pin down — making his way from a bookstore clerk in Atlanta, to forklift driver, Con Ed roadside power lines crew, census worker, mentor to autistic children over the years, all the while recording from Tuscon to Lubbock, Alberta to San Fran to rural Washington to, now, Kingston, New York. Note one of his records has ever been panned by the critics, and yet, his reputation has never breached the levy that keeps fringe acts from the Starbucks crowd — less one brief glimpse at a broader audience when a particularly bleak and beautiful track made an unexpected appearance in a series of Volkswagen commercials years after its 1998 release.
With collaborators spanning from Calexico to members of Tortoise, the Sea and the Cake, Palace Brothers, Sonic Youth, to Guided by Voices, Sebadoh and more, Buckner has been making excellent music in excellent company for eighteen years, and now from his Kingston, New York home base, he joined the roster of the O+ Kingston 2012 where he performed at Kingston’s Old Dutch Church venue and received long-wanted dental care via O+’s wellness exchange. Since, Buckner has been a welcomed part of the O+ family. Above is his exclusive performance and interview for Kingston’s StudiO+, filmed and produced by O+ partners Evolving Media Network.
A version of this article by Alexandra Marvar appeared in the Kingston NY O+ 2012 program, published by Chronogram
Founded in Kingston, New York, chapters of O+ (“O Positive,” like the blood type) across America host weekend-long annual art and music festivals where artists and musicians exhibit their talents in exchange for access to medical, vision, dental, and alternative care from art-loving, volunteer doctors and other wellness professionals at the O+ Pop-Up Clinic.
O+ renews and strengthens communities by unifying local artists and musicians, health professionals, property owners, business owners and neighbors under a common goal, and strives to develop a model for all communities in which perpetual access to affordable and reliable wellness services for the working creative community can become a reality.
Contact O+ acting executive director, outreach coordinator, and local artist Joe Concra at joe@opositivefestival.org if you’re interested in hosting a chapter of O+ Festival in your own community.
