O+ Festival

The O+ Festival returns to the streets of Kingston October 10-12th, 2025 for the 15th Annual celebration of art, music, and wellness. But this isn’t just another music festival. O+ provides no-cost , on-site healthcare to artists and volunteers in exchange for participating and sharing their work with the public throughout the festival weekend. We call this “exchanging the art of medicine for the medicine of art” and this work is needed now more than ever.

The three day schedule kicks off with O+’s beloved parade, over 50 live music events, dozens of visual and performance art activations, spoken word, comedy, film, dance, cycling, and over 20 public facing wellness workshops throughout the weekend. The beloved BlO+ck Party returns to Wall Street on Saturday afternoon, filling two blocks with vendors, entertainment, local organizations, health information and screenings.

Headlining the 2025 O+ Festival is legendary rap pioneer Kool Keith, who’s iconic, genre-bending career has spanned over three decades. As bold and unpredictable as ever, don’t miss Kool Keith takes the stage at Assembly on Sat, October 11th at 9pm. Also at the top of this year’s bill is the long-awaited reunion of the celebrated cult experimental indie sibling duo The Fiery Furnaces and other music highlights include Hudson Valley-based soulful songstress Rachel Yamagata, Grammy Award winner Leslie Mendelson, and New York indie rockers Wild Pink. The explosive music lineup fills out with more than 45 other music acts filling venues all over Kingston.

Every year, O+ Festival presents a multimedia program, curated around a theme, full of sights, sounds and experiences that offer something for everyone. This year’s theme is POWER. The work presented, through an array of art programming, examines how power is wielded, challenged, harnessed, distributed and transformed.

Documentary film and dance sit in the spotlight of this year’s art lineup bringing innovation, subversion and representation to explorations of the human experience, history and language as well as the importance of speaking truth to power. The Chase Brock Experience, a rollicking resident company at Theatre Row on 42nd St and Modern Accord Depot in Accord, NY, will perform an excerpt from the dance narrative COME HOME, set to shanties and songs of the seas. Accomplished duo Laura Coe (choreographer) and Liv Butowsky will present These Words, a movement based performance highlighting the 198 words the Trump Administration seeks to “remove” that explores the relationship between language and power.

The documentary short, One Story At a Time (2024), will be screened throughout the afternoon on October 11th at The Hudson Valley LGBTQ+ Center, in partnership with TMI Project and in celebration of National Coming Out Day. Directed by Eva Tenuto and Natalia Iyudin, this 10-min film tells the story of Celeste Lecesne (co-founder of The Trevor Project and The Future Perfect Project) whose life is a reminder of the ability for each of us to change the world by speaking our truth, one story at a time.

Two feature length documentary films, Beautiful Losers and Chile Estyle, will be screened as a double feature in partnership with Upstate Films. Both films highlight transformative moments in the history of street art and the subcultures through which creative innovation, belonging and movements were formed. Chile Estyle (2022), directed by Pablo Aravena, explores the past and present of Chile’s unique street art tradition that took hold in the 1960’s in reaction to an oppressive political regime. Beautiful Losers (2008), by filmmaker/artist Aaron Rose, and co-directed by Joshua Leonard, focuses on the work and evolution of a group of young artists – including Mike Mills, Barry McGee (aka Twist), Steve ESPO Powers, Harmony Korine, Shepard Fairey, Claire Rojas, Margaret Kilgallen and Mark Gonzales – who began a new art movement(s) in the 1990’s that pulled from the DIY aesthetics at the intersection of skateboarding culture, graffiti, punk and hip-hop.

The wellness and community focused BlO+ck Party will return to Wall Street in Uptown Kingston on Saturday Oct 11th from 1-6pm, which is open to the public, no wristbands required. ExplO+re, the public facing wellness offerings at O+ Festival, will round out the weekend’s schedule with opportunities for attendees to deep dive into a range of topics and modalities set to include sound healing, yoga, dance, presentations from health experts, hands-on activities for families and more.

O+ will close the festival weekend with a night of music and comedy at Assembly featuring breakout artist Charlene Kaye, bringing her celebrated Work-In-Progress show on the heels of a recent multi-page feature in Rolling Stone Magazine. With sharp wit, soaring vocals, and a magnetic stage presence, Kaye’s musical comedy set is not to be missed!

At the heart and behind the scenes of O+ is the Artists’ Clinic. All artists, musicians, and volunteers access a variety of healthcare services through this pop-up clinic in exchange for their contributions to the festival – everything from dental care to acupuncture, chiropractic, reiki, dermatology, nutrition counseling, physical exams, connection with mental health professionals and so much more.

At O+, we believe that everyone deserves equitable access to healthcare as well as the healing power of art in all of its forms. O+ Festival wristbands are available for presale now! Proceeds from every by-donation wristband sold directly supports O+ in expanding the year round exchange, providing preventative healthcare for artists and building healthier, more resilient communities through the arts.

The O+ 2025 Lineup including music, art, writing, comedy and wellness is now available @opositivefest/ opositivefestival.org.