Kingston’s annual O+ Festival returns October 10–12, 2025, for its 15th year of music, art, and radical community care. Headlining this year’s festival are Kool Keith, the Fiery Furnaces, and author Jonathan Lethem.
What began in 2010 as an inspired barter—musicians and muralists trading their talents for healthcare—has grown into one of the most distinctive cultural happenings in the Hudson Valley. O+ transforms Kingston’s streets, galleries, and music venues into a vibrant creative commons, where the currency is creativity and the reward is well-being.
At the heart of it all is the clinic, a pop-up sanctuary staffed by volunteer doctors, dentists, therapists, acupuncturists, and bodyworkers, offering free care to the festival’s participating artists. Over the years, thousands of musicians, painters, dancers, and writers have received medical attention, mental health services, and dental care—much of it the kind of preventive and restorative treatment working artists often can’t afford in our winner-takes-most healthcare system. And since 2024, the O+ Exchange Clinic in Kingston has been offering this same spirit of mutual aid year-round.
The 2025 lineup mixes national legends with local heroes and indie upstarts. Headlining this year is Kool Keith, the surrealist hip-hop pioneer whose elastic flow has been bending minds since the Ultramagnetic MCs first broke onto the scene in the 1980s. The Fiery Furnaces, the beloved art-rock project fronted by Eleanor Friedberger, whose angular guitar work and deadpan vocals anchor the band’s sound, will also perform. Singer-songwriter Rachael Yamagata brings her smoky, soul-baring ballads, while Wild Pink delivers shimmering heartland indie rock with cinematic sweep. Akie Bermiss of Lake Street Dive, equally at home behind a Fender Rhodes or crooning a jazz standard, adds his signature warmth to the weekend, and Erik Burke, the street artist whose large-scale works have redefined urban landscapes, returns to leave his mark on Kingston’s walls.
But O+ has never been just a music festival or a mural crawl. It’s a multidisciplinary mashup where dance, literature, and wellness practices sit comfortably alongside the gigs. This year’s lineup features a special reading by novelist Jonathan Lethem, who splits his time between California and the Catskills and whose genre-blurring fiction has won him a MacArthur genius grant and a cult following. The Chase Brock Experience, a contemporary dance company helmed by the Catskills-raised Brock, will bring their kinetic, joyous movement to the streets and stages of Kingston. And the rest of the schedule—jam-packed with yoga sessions, group bike rides, sound baths, and Narcan trainings—reminds us that art, like health, is both individual and collective.
In a world where creativity is too often squeezed for profit and healthcare treated as a luxury, O+ offers a refreshing counterpoint: a weekend where art and care are freely exchanged, and where the community uplifts its artists not just with applause, but with compassion. Fifteen years in, it remains one of the Hudson Valley’s most visionary gatherings, a joyful reminder that well-being, like art, is best when shared.
Related Stories
O+ Debuts Year-Round Health Clinic for Artists with Benefit Concert
This article appears in July 2025.
