Now in its 65th year, the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair (TOAF) offers a different model that combines public gallery access with non-profit initiatives designed to support artists beyond a single weekend of sales. This year, under the thematic umbrella of “Elegance of Longevity,” the exhibition addressed the issue of ageism, drawing inspiration from its anniversary, as the age of 65 is usually associated with retirement. In the art world, age often becomes a definitive 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 indicators rarely reflect how artists actually live and work, yet they shape opportunities for funding, institutional recognition, and market visibility. “A lot of artists don’t have the luxury of retirement,” TOAF executive and creative director Anahita Azarhimi told the Observer. “Artists are constantly adapting, transforming, reshaping and renewing things.”
Over the years, more than 20,000 artists have begun their careers at TOAF — Canada’s largest and longest-running contemporary art event — which was co-founded by former National Gallery of Canada director Alan Jarvis, artist Jack Pollock and philanthropists Murray and Marvel Kovler. It has expanded dramatically, putting $2 million (excluding $65,000 in prizes) directly into artists’ pockets. Under the decade-long leadership of Azrahimi, a practicing artist, she has developed a robust infrastructure to support independent artists, including year-round professional development programs covering pricing, booth set-up and take-down, audience outreach and more.
TOAF’s commitment to longevity extends beyond the artists to the collectors who preserve their artistic lives. Through Living Room Conversations, available as part of a $150 annual membership, the gallery creates opportunities for deeper engagement between artists and collectors. (In 2016, Anahita Azarhimi recalled, one artist sold his entire show to a collector, whose family has been that artist’s patron ever since.) Another intergenerational initiative is the Budding Art Buyers program, sponsored by the Art Dealers Association of Canada, which allows children under 14 to buy works of art for $10 to $20, and the organization then teaches them about care, provenance and investment. This year, the gallery also turned artists into collectors with its “$65 for 65 Years” initiative, giving each participant money to purchase works from their peers.
In this context, Art Nest curator Rory Pimienta organized “A Forward Retreat” with Peggy Becker, Max Dean, Naomi Dodds, Micah Lexier, and Ed Bean to reflect on the issue of retirement. The exhibition text sets the tone: “Not retirement. Rather, stepping back. An exhibition about the longevity of art, practice, and artists who keep the vocation alive.” Baker created a dance tribute to veteran dancer Giulia Sasso. in Story (with laughter, tears and beauty)She extends the lifespan of dance beyond assumptions about aging bodies. in One daydistributes coins numbered to represent each day of his life. The underside of each coin directly faces death: “From that day forward, I will give away coins, one to each person, until all the coins are gone or I die.” Ben’s mirrors, arranged among antique vanities, invite viewers to take a snapshot of themselves amid the crowds and city skyline, prompting them to contemplate the passage of time. Next to them are Dodds Same through another Geological and sedimentary time is represented by steel rock-like formations with a similarly reflective surface.
Dean’s “Death: An Exhibition of the Works of Martha Florey” displays 50 years of his late wife’s works installed with upside-down furniture reconfigured into paintings. An antique sofa hovers above a black-and-white painting of a prone figure wrapped in a blanket; A skeleton on a stand cradling a living figure on its canvas. The gravity-defying arrangements emphasize the inevitability of death while keeping Flory’s work urgently present.
At the booths, Mi’kmaw artist Melissa Peter Paul of Abegweit First Nation, PE, used featherwork to invoke ecological time, seasonal harvests and ancestral making methods – likely the first time the medium has been featured in the gallery. Its people harvest porcupine quills from the roads after offering a blessing of tobacco; The quills are washed three times, dyed and pierced into the birch bark, which can only be harvested two weeks a year, around June, when the fireflies come out. In the final step, she weaves sweet grass – a sacred medicine – around each completed work.
Campbellville, Ontario-based artist David Khosravi draws on more than 20 years of practice to give neglected wood a new life. He makes vessels from faux logs — native Canadian wood with the occasional foreign variation — inspired by the patterns of Persian rugs to achieve an optical illusion effect that makes the wood mimic glazed pottery.
Toronto-based Anna Kavehmehr is building diaspora memory and political resistance in her ward. Her installation honored a friend, a doll maker killed in recent freedom protests in Iran. The pencil images in red frames, mounted on black canvas, show figures with distorted eyes and heads twisted like the hard-to-read Persian script that surrounds them – a meditation on language, loss, and the reconstruction of identity across borders and generations.
This year’s TOAF Festival was a reminder that artists deserve infrastructures that can continue alongside their practices. Rather than treating 65 as the point at which creative work should end, the exhibition questions what it means to sustain artistic life over decades. In doing so, he quietly challenges one of the art world’s most persistent assumptions: that an artist’s value is tied to where they fall on the “emerging,” “mid-career,” or “late-career” ladder. She points out that artistic life is best understood through continuity rather than chronology.
More at art fairs, biennials and triennials
