Now in his 65th year, Toronto Outdoor Art Fair (TOAF) offers a different model that merges the accessibility of a public fair with non-profit initiatives designed to support artists beyond a single sales weekend. This year, under the thematic umbrella of “Elegance of Longevity”, the fair addressed ageing, taking its cue from its anniversary year, 65, an age usually associated with retirement. In the art world, age often becomes a categorical metric that determines whether an artist is considered emerging, mid-career, or late-career, and for artists from historically marginalized communities, these categories can create additional barriers to resources and recognition. Arbitrary markers rarely reflect how artists live and work, yet they shape funding opportunities, institutional recognition, and market visibility. “A lot of artists don’t have the luxury of retirement,” executive and creative director of TOAF Anahita Azrahimi said the Observer. “Artists are constantly adapting, transforming, reconfiguring things and regenerating.”
Over the years, more than 20,000 artists have launched their careers at TOAF—Canada’s largest and longest-running contemporary art event, which was co-founded by the former Director of the National Gallery of Canada Alan Jarvisartist Jack Pollock and philanthropists Murray and Marvell Koffler. It has expanded significantly, putting $2 million (excluding $65,000 in prizes) directly into artists’ pockets. Under Azrahim’s ten-year leadership, a practicing artist herself, she has developed a robust support infrastructure for independent artists, including year-round professional development programming covering pricing, booth set-up and takedown, public relations and more.
TOAF’s commitment to longevity extends beyond the artists and collectors who support artistic careers. Through Collective Collector Events, available as part of a $150 annual membership, the fair creates opportunities for deeper artist-collector engagement. (In 2016, Anahita Azrahimi recalls, an artist sold his entire exhibit to a collector, whose family has been a patron of that artist ever since.) Another intergenerational initiative is the Budding Art Buyers program, curated by the Art Dealers Association of Canada, which allows children under 14 to buy artwork for $10-20 to show care and concern for them. This year, the fair also turned artists into collectors through its “$65 for 65 Years” initiative, giving each participant money to buy work from peers.
In this regard, Art Nest curator Rui Pimenta organized “A Forward Retreat” with Peggy Baker, Max Dean, Naomi Dodds, Micah Lexier AND Ed Pien to reflect on the issue of retirement. The text of the exhibition sets the tone: “No retirement. A retreat forward. An exhibition about the longevity of art, of practice and of artists who keep the call alive.” Baker created a choreographed tribute to the veteran dancer Julia Sasso. IN History (with laughter, tears and beauty)it extends the perceived longevity of dance beyond assumptions about aging bodies. IN One dayLexier hands out numbered coins to represent each day of his life. The bottom of each coin directly confronts mortality: “From that day forward I will give out coins, one coin per person, until all the coins are gone or I die.” Arranged among antique vanities, Pien’s mirrors invite viewers to capture a picture of themselves amidst the crowd and city skyline, prompting reflection on the passage of time. Next to them, Dodds’ Self Through the Other marks geologic and sedimentary time through steel rock-like formations with a similar reflective surface.
Dean’s “Passing On: An Exhibition of Martha Fleury‘s Work” featured 50 years of his late wife’s work installed with upside-down furniture like a tableau. An antique bathroom hovers above a black-and-white painting of a figure wrapped in a blanket; a skeleton on an easel embraces a living figure on its canvas. Adjusting gravity by challenging the essence of death Fleury’s work is urgently present.
In booths, Mi’kmaw artist Melissa Peter-Paul from Abegwait First Nation, PE, used quillwork to invoke ecological time, seasonal harvest and ancestral ways of production—likely the first time the medium has appeared at the fair. Her people harvest mushrooms from road kill after offering a tobacco blessing; the cloths are washed three times, dyed and drilled into the birch bark, which can only be harvested two weeks a year, around June, when the fireflies emerge. In the final step, she weaves sweet grass—the holy medicine—around each finished work.
Campbellville, Ontario based artist David Khosravi is based on more than 20 years of practice in giving new life to discarded wood. He creates vessels from industrial woodcuts—native Canadian wood with the occasional foreign contrast—inspired by Persian carpet patterns to achieve a trompe l’oeil effect that makes the wood mimic glazed pottery.
based in Toronto Anna Kavehmehr constructs diasporic memory and political resistance in its cabin. Her installation honored a friend, a doll maker killed in the recent freedom protests in Iran. Portraits drawn in pencil in red frames, set against black canvas, show figures with distorted eyes and heads that twist like the barely legible Farsi text that surrounds them – a meditation on language, the loss and reconstruction of identity across borders and generations.
This year’s TOAF served as a reminder that artists deserve infrastructures capable of standing alongside their practices. Rather than treating 65 as the point at which creative work must end, the fair asks what it means to sustain an artistic life for decades. In doing so, he quietly challenges one of the art world’s most persistent assumptions: that an artist’s worth is tied to where he falls on a scale of “emerging,” “mid-career,” or “late-career.” Artistic lives, he suggests, are best understood through continuity rather than chronology.
More at art fairs, biennials and triennials
