O+ Festival Kingston

October 10-12, 2025

Submissions for the 15th Annual O+ Festival are now open!

Applications Open March 10th, 2025
All submissions due by May 4th, 2025 at 11:59p.m.

The O+ Festival is a celebration of art, music and wellness that offers access to health care for participating artists while providing the community with an opportunity to experience the healing and transformative power of art in all its forms. O+ (pronounced Oh Positive) fosters physical, mental and social well-being by connecting artists and musicians directly with a coalition of healthcare/wellness providers and resources in a shared vision to nurture both the individual and the community. By exchanging the art of medicine for the medicine of art, O+ empowers communities to take control of their collective wellbeing. Click HERE for detailed information on our mission. 

O+ Festival Kingston is now accepting submissions from artists of all styles, practices, identities and levels of experience to create murals that add new perspectives and visual language to O+'s beloved Mural Program. The O+ Art Committee aims to curate work from these submissions, to be produced in and around the Kingston area, that  reflects the meaningful juxtaposition between Kingston’s dynamic, multicultural neighborhoods and compelling, radical, relevant contemporary artwork. 

We invest in murals because public artwork provides communities with broad, inclusive and positive representation of the human experience while producing chance encounters with the transformative power of art in our everyday lives. Since its first public mural in 2013, the O+ Mural Program prioritizes the expression of women, BIPOC, nonbinary, trans and queer folk, and is committed to the continued expansion of representation, especially from a first person perspective, made possible through public art. All artists will be considered on the merit of their work and we are proud to provide intentional opportunities to amplify the stories and voices of historically marginalized people through the occupation and reclamation of public space that muralism provides. 

O+ Festival builds its program around a new theme each year and we ask writers to consider the theme in their proposals. In a time marked by political turbulence and division, art emerges as a potent instrument of the people—a medium through which voices are amplified, dissent is visualized, and collective resilience is forged.

This year’s’ O+ Festival explores POWER. 

What is power? Who holds it? How is it sustained? When do we wield it, when do we resist it? How do we, consciously or unconsciously, uphold structures that reinforce inequitable access to it? How do we share it? What happens when it is redefined or redistributed? How do we reclaim it when attempts are made at taking it from us? 

O+ Festival 2025 offers a space to reconsider power not just as something to be held, but as something to be shared, dismantled, or reframed. Submissions are welcome that explore the nature of power in all of its forms, structures, expressions and complexity. We seek work that examines how it is wielded, challenged, distributed and reimagined. The structures that sustain power, the forces that resist it, and the possibilities for its transformation. Some pieces may confront systems of dominance, exposing the weight of authority, surveillance, and inequality. Others celebrate empowerment, resilience, resistance and the transformative potential of collective action. The interplay between these perspectives underscores the fluidity of power—how it shifts, adapts, and manifests in both visible and invisible ways.

Learn more about this year’s theme HERE.

Submissions may address this theme in whatever way(s) feels relevant to the artist in the scope of their current work. In your submission form, we request images of previous work that express the formal, conceptual and/or stylistic approach you intend to employ in your mural. We do not require O+ muralists to have previous mural making experience but do look to the work samples for proof of your ability and approach. We do not require a mock-up of the proposed mural at this time. A mock-up will be requested upon acceptance and once a potential wall is provided to you. Building owners will be presented with accepted mural proposals for the festival and may choose to steward the work of those artists. In O+'s model, artists are dictating the subject matter of the piece, with supportive direction from the organization's Art Director. Building owners may ask for limited changes to be made to the initial proposal but will not be in the position to significantly steer the content of the work. In this way, the model does not resemble a commission. 

The O+ Mural Program has grown significantly over the last decade and we now have approximately 64 existing murals in the Kingston area alone. Our focus when pursuing walls for murals is finding the right context for selected artists and their proposed concepts. Beyond the quality of the work, we also have to consider what walls are available, what wall owner preferences are, city and historic area regulations, neighbors living in a given location, representation, budget and more. We will hustle to find the best possible wall for your work if it is selected but cannot promise artists their ideal/preferred location, scale or surface quality. We ask that artists who are selected remain open to producing their work in the locations available to us with the understanding that we will work to support their success every step of the way.

All submissions will be reviewed, and the festival art program will be curated, by the O+ Art Committee - a group of O+ alumni, practitioners, industry professionals, and community members representing different practices, identities and perspectives. Accepted submissions will be invited to participate at this year’s festival in exchange for access to care in the O+ Artists’ Clinic which is the primary compensation for sharing your work with the public. 

As O+ artists receive access to no cost healthcare, of all kinds, through our exchange, we are not a typical mural festival. Muralists are provided with paint and standard supplies, lifts/scaffolds and/or ladders (when relevant), transportation support, housing support in town (if needed), and a modest, flat stipend of $500 to compensate for their time. Additional support comes through the prepping of walls including cleaning, priming and base coating, projection support to jumpstart the project, documentation of the process and product, and youth intern support (when possible/relevant). O+'s Art Director will secure walls, mediate the building owner relationships and secure a building agreement with them upon mock-up approval that seeks to protect the artist, O+ and the property during production and beyond. Muralists will also be supplied with an artist agreement to ensure understanding of the terms, the approved mock-up and to protect their efforts. 

You can expect to be notified regarding your submission by mid-June. This year, we expect to receive hundreds of submissions for a finite number of artist slots. Capacity for mural production each year is limited to less than 10. The number of walls produced each year is determined by many factors including budget, walls available, capacity to produce the work in addition to all other O+ Festival artists, responsiveness to the theme and how the work proposed might add to the collection of public art that exists through the Mural Program. 

We ask for your patience and understanding should your submission not be accepted for this year and encourage all who are not chosen for O+ Festival 2025 to reapply in the years ahead.

A note to O+ Alum: Lower priority may be given to muralists who have produced large scale murals in previous O+ Kingston Festivals, though we encourage all to apply. Building owners are asked to agree to a minimum of three years commitment to steward the work of our muralists and we seek to have as many perspectives available through the public art in Kingston at any given time. As our mission is centered in cultivating a diverse community of artists to whom we are offering access to healthcare, we also want to make sure we reach those who have yet to participate and may have a need to acquire care.

We continue to expand our model of care through the year round O+ Exchange Clinic. Through art and wellness programming in that space, we are constantly looking for new ways provide care and opportunities to artists. If you aren’t accepted for this year’s festival, you may be contacted over the year ahead with additional ways to connect you with O+. We thank you in advance for your understanding. 

Thank you for your interest in O+ Festival and support of our mission. 

We look forward to the opportunity to review your submission!

Positively, 

The 2025 O+ Kingston Art Committee

Please do not let any barriers, personal, perceived or technical, get in the way of submitting your work. Reach out to us for assistance in applying if you need support of any kind at info@opositivefestival.org or by phone at (845) 399-5343.