Receipt of Existing Art Project

Receipt of Existing is a social practice project born from one student’s encounter with Portland’s increasingly inaccessible healthcare system. After Care Oregon dropped a large number of mental-health providers, the organizer found themselves forced into an impossible decision: either lose their therapist or take on additional insurance through the university. Months of searching, phone calls, tears, and dead ends led to the only viable option: becoming double-insured through OHP and the university plan.

That choice added nearly $1,200 per term to their student debt, at 9% interest, simply to maintain basic, familiar mental-health care. For someone raised in a family of healthcare workers, the realization was jarring: the people with the least resources are often required to carry the heaviest burdens to receive essential care.

Through our art projects, we seek to address social issues, advocate for equitable healthcare access, and empower individuals to be active participants in shaping a healthier society.

This project grew from that moment of clarity. Receipt of Existing collects anonymous “receipts” is short, printed records of personal experiences with healthcare costs, frustration, denial, or survival. Each one is printed on a sticker roll, cut to whatever length a person needs to tell their story, and passed hand-to-hand in the city. These receipts may not reform policy on their own, but they gather into a shared record of everyday struggle, a quiet archive of what it costs simply to exist.

Anyone may participate. Anyone may add to the archive. The project is designed to be carried forward, copied, remixed, or expanded by anyone who feels called to it. The organizer has no formal training in healthcare or web design, only the lived experience that seeded this work, and the hope that by naming these stories publicly, others will feel less alone, and those with influence might finally notice what has long been invisible.