Now in its 65th year, the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair (TOAF) offers a unique model that combines public exhibition accessibility with non-profit programs designed to support artists beyond a single weekend sale. This year, under the umbrella titled “The Elegance of Longevity,” ageism is rightly speaking, taking its cue from its anniversary year, the age of 65 which is often associated with retirement. In the art world, age is often a metric of class whether an artist is considered emerging, mid-career or late, and for artists from previously disadvantaged communities, these categories can create additional barriers to services and recognition. Self-made labels do not often reflect how artists actually live and work, but they shape funding opportunities, institutional recognition and market visibility. “Many artists don’t have the luxury of retirement,” TOAF CEO and artistic director Anahita Azrahimi told the Observer. “Artists are always adapting, changing, rearranging things and reinventing themselves.”
Over the years, more than 20,000 artists have launched their careers at TOAF—Canada’s largest and longest-running contemporary art event—co-founded by former National Gallery of Canada Director Alan Jarvis, artist Jack Pollock and philanthropists Murray and Marvelle Koffler. It grew enormously, putting $2 million (in addition to $65,000 in prizes) into the artists’ pockets. Under the ten-year leadership of Azrahimi, who is also a practicing artist, he has developed a strong infrastructure to support independent artists, including year-round professional development programs including pricing, booth setup and takedown, public relations and more.
TOAF’s commitment to longevity extends beyond artists to collectors who support works of art. Through its Lounge Conversations, available as part of a $150 annual membership, the show creates opportunities for deep artist-collector engagement. (In 2016, Anahita Azrahimi recalled that the artist sold her entire exhibition to one collector, and her family has been a patron of the artist ever since.) Another intergenerational initiative is the Young Art Buyers Program, run by the Art Dealers Association of Canada, which allows children under the age of 14 to buy art for $10-20, teach them about investing and then educate them. to take care of. This year, the show also turned artists into collectors with its “$65 for 65 Years” program, which gives each participant money to buy work from peers.
For that reason, Art Nest curator Ruri Pimenta organized a “Forward Retreat” with Peggy Baker, Max Dean, Naomi Dodds, Micah Lexier and Ed Pien to reflect on the question of retirement. The exhibition’s text sets the tone: “Not giving up. Going back and forth. An exhibition about the longevity of art, practice, and the artists who keep the calling alive.” Baker created a choreographic tribute to veteran dancer Julia Sasso. In Story (with laughter, tears and beauty)he extends the perceived shelf life of dance beyond speculation about aging bodies. In One dayLexier offers coins with numbers to represent all the days of his life. The bottom half of each coin directly deals with death: “From that day on I will give out coins, one coin for each person, until all the coins are gone or I die.” Pien’s mirrors, arranged among ancient vanities, invite viewers to capture their own snapshot in the midst of the crowd and the city skyline, encouraging reflection on time. Besides them, Dodds’ You Are One it marks geological and sedimentary time by means of stone-like formations with the same bright surface.
Dean’s “Passing On: An Exhibition of Martha Fleury’s Work” covered 50 years of his late wife’s work with an upside-down tableaux. An antique set hovers above a black-and-white painting of a prone figure wrapped in a blanket; the skeleton of an easel incorporates a living person into its canvas. The gravity-defying arrangements emphasize the propriety of death while Fleury’s work is kept alive with urgency.
In the booths, Mi’kmaw artist Melissa Peter-Paul of Abegweit First Nation, PE, used quillwork to make use of nature’s time, seasonal harvests and ancestral techniques—which may be the first time the course has been shown at the exhibition. The people there harvest porcupines from the mounds of the road after blessing the tobacco; the quills are washed three times, dyed and pounded into birchbark, which can only be harvested for two weeks a year, around June, when the fireflies come out. In the final step, he weaves a sweet grass—a sacred herb—into each completed work.
Campbellville, Ontario artist David Khosravi draws on over 20 years of practice to give discarded wood new life. He creates vessels from industrial timber—a native Canadian wood with an exotic twist—inspired by Persian rug patterns to achieve a trompe l’oeil effect that makes the wood mimic glazed pottery.
Toronto-based Anna Kavehmehr constructs diasporic memory and political resistance in her place. Her installation honored her friend, a doll maker who was killed in the recent freedom protests in Iran. Pencil drawings in red frames, set against black canvas, depict figures with distorted eyes and twisted heads as illegible Farsi text surrounds them—a meditation on language, loss and the reconstruction of identity across borders and generations.
This year’s TOAF was a reminder that artists deserve an infrastructure that can endure and their practices. Instead of treating 65 as the point at which creative work must end, the exhibition asks what it means to sustain artistic life across the decades. In doing so, it quietly challenges one of the most persistent assumptions in the art world: that an artist’s value is tied to where they fall on the ladder of “emerging,” “mid-career” or “dead.” It suggests that artistic lives are best understood in terms of continuity rather than chronology.
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