Indie pop stalwarts The Magnetic Fields and “first lady of graffiti” Lady Pink headline the 11th O+ Festival Oct. 8-10 in Kingston, N.Y. The unique weekend connects participating artists and musicians with vital healthcare, mental healthcare, dentistry and wellness services.
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To celebrate a new community partnership between The Arc Mid-Hudson and O+, and the creation of O+’s largest Kingston-based mural to date, O+ is throwing a BlO+ck Party!
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On the evening of May 25th, one year following the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives
Matter mural in Kingston was illuminated to provide a space for our community to grieve, to
speak, to sing and to hold light together.
Saturday, May 22nd, 12p.m.-2p.m.
O+ Festival and Kingston Women’s Bike Festival are partnering on Tough As A Mother, a family friendly mural ride celebrating images that elevate the strength of mothers and the power of the feminine spirit. The group will meet at the Kingston Library lot for a brief introduction to the ride by Rose Quinn from KWBF and Lindsey Wolkowicz Art Director at O+. From there, the ride will wind its way through Midtown Kingston and head towards its final destination in the Stockade. Along the way, the group will stop at 6 O+ Festival murals, and pass several others, and other notable sites to discuss some of the imagery, artists and history in Kingston that elevates the stories, struggles and impact of women in our community and on our own sense of empowerment, both locally and universally.
This ride is family friendly and all are welcome. During this event we will also be introducing a challenge ride of the same name, “Tough As A Mother,” a 16+ group led by Rose Quinn of Kingston Women’s Bike Fest to meet/train throughout the summer, culminating in a ride up Popletown Road to Shaupeneak Ridge Park during the O+ Festival October 8-10th, 2021.
O+ has long included cycling as a dynamic aspect of our programming and we are excited to participate in this program as another way of supporting all riders in feeling safe and empowered as they access bikes as vehicles for wellness.
O+ will celebrate its 11th annual festival of art, music and wellness in Kingston on October 8th-10th, 2021. O+ Kingston is a convergence of arts and wellness. How do art and music support, complement, and magnify health and wellness?
Artists are asked to respond to the theme in their application to make, perform or install a work during O+ Kingston.
Here are some ideas artists and musicians may consider as they explore this year’s theme of O+YGEN.
Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen.
~ Laura Hillenbrand
O+YGEN is breath and wind, energy, a chemical and a gas that flows between us; an invisible, essential force.
We breathe in O+YGEN, without much conscious thought, approximately 25,000 times per day.
What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
~ Mary Oliver
O+YGEN forms compounds like water which makes up 70% of the human body and covers 70% of the Earth’s surface.
O+YGEN is at the core of healing, balance, meditation and self-empowerment.
Singing is like a celebration of oxygen.
~ Bjork
O+YGEN forms compounds by reacting. These processes are often accompanied by the presence of heat and light in the form of combustions.
O+YGEN feeds the cells of all living organisms but it also feeds a fire’s flames.
…we say that there are three sources of energy–sexual, breath, and spirit…The second source of energy is khi, breath energy. Life can be described as a process of burning. In order to burn, every cell in our body needs nutrition and oxygen…
~Thich Nhat Hahn
O+YGEN is contradictory; it is both essential and invisible.
O+YGEN is visible to us only in extremes – extreme cold, extreme intimacy or the extreme of a public health crisis.
…We all breathe the same air, but we don’t breathe equally. As the Black Lives Matter movement returns with fresh vigour, it arrives with the lessons of the pandemic in hand. There are clear links between the direct state violence experienced by George Floyd and the indirect state violence which distributes healthcare unequally, which removes the safety nets from under certain communities, and which bails out businesses and leaves ordinary people to fend for themselves.
~ Jennifer Mills, The Guardian, Oct 3, 2020
O+YGEN itself has been denied to some as an act of violent dehumanization; its denial acting as a signifier for inequity at its most intolerable.
O+YGEN is a symbol for all that has been lost, all that has been given and all that we have exchanged during the pandemic that cannot be contained within a singular form.
The O+ Art and Music Committees look forward to receiving explorations and interpretations of O+YGEN for this year’s O+ Festival in Kingston.
Following a year of placing most events on hold as our communities have grappled with crisis, O+ Festival will return to Kingston, NY October 8-10, 2021.
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O+ is partnering with The Actors Fund to support alumni artists and musicians in understanding their health insurance options.
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O+ is lighting up a number of murals painted throughout its decade-long festival history for one night only this Saturday, Oct. 10, from 6-10 p.m. in Kingston, N.Y.
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O+ and a number of partners will offer instruction in administering Narcan, which temporarily reverses the effects of overdoses from opioids, on Saturday, Oct. 10
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Art will be installed in Kingston storefront and gallery windows Sept.12 – Oct.12 as part of PO+p Up 2020, an exhibition celebrating artists who have participated in O+ Kingston festivals and fundraising events between 2010 and 2019.
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