The Toronto Outdoor Art Fair marks its 65th anniversary at Nathan Phillips Square with a program that extends beyond exhibition into celebration. This milestone year includes music, dance, an awards ceremony, and a birthday event for TOAF 65, alongside daily art tours and talks that offer visitors deeper engagement with the works. Organized across five distinct zones, the fair brings together artists from across Canada, creating a broad and inclusive national platform.
As in previous years, Art Nest serves as a central curated exhibition, this year featuring Peggy Baker, Max Dean, Naomi Dodds, Micah Lexier, and Ed Pien, under the direction of Rui Pimenta. Framed as both celebration and reflection, the 65th anniversary is positioned not as an endpoint, but as a transition shaped by memory, time, and continuity.
Max Dean’s Passing On anchors the exhibition in a deeply personal register. By distributing the artworks of his late wife, Martha Fleury, he transforms private grief into collective care, inviting the public to carry her legacy forward. This sense of intimacy extends into the surrounding installation, where domestic objects and reflective surfaces create a quiet space for contemplation. The work resonated strongly with visitors, drawing large lineups of people eager to receive and take responsibility for her artworks.
Max Dean, Under Over, Over Under, Passing On, installation for Martha Fleury’s memory, mixed media
Ed Pien’s Mirror, Mirror deepens this introspection through twelve antique vanities layered with text. As visitors sit and face their reflections, identity becomes unstable and shifting, shaped by time and perception. The act of writing responses further blurs the line between viewer and participant, turning reflection into an active process.
Mirror, Mirror, installation by Ed Pien, Antique & vintage wood furniture, mirrors & upholstery.
Micah Lexier’s One Day introduces a different form of exchange. By distributing coins representing each day of his life, he transforms time into a tangible object that circulates among visitors. This gesture creates an immediate connection, allowing the artwork to extend beyond the exhibition through everyday human interaction.
One Day by Micah Lexier, custom made aluminium coins
Naomi Dodds’ large-scale stainless-steel sculptures ground the space with a material exploration of identity and aging. Her work frames the self as relational and evolving, where transformation carries past and present together rather than separating them.
Naomi Dodds, One Self Through Another
Beyond Art Nest, other sections of the fair expand on themes of memory, materiality, and place. Tash Damjanovic’s delicate photographs, created through Polaroid emulsion lift techniques, balance texture, colour, and emotional quiet. Her images of Toronto reimagine the city as contemplative rather than demanding. Accompanied by a video documenting her intricate process, her work draws viewers not only into the image but into the act of making itself, sparking curiosity and a desire to learn her technique.
Tash Damjanovic, Toronto City , (the centred one) A Skyline to Breath in, photography and digital media
From the Unique Québec section, Montreal-based artist James Kennedy reinterprets photography through industrial material processes. Using acid on steel and laser-cutting techniques, he transforms photographic images into layered, three-dimensional surfaces. His series Relics of Memory evokes both recognition and nostalgia, as viewers identify familiar places while encountering them as altered, almost archaeological traces of time.
James Kennedy, Continents, Islands & Lakes, steel work
The exhibition The Land and the Sea Bind Us, curated by Bushra Junaid, brings together artists from across Atlantic Canada (Zone C), foregrounding Indigenous knowledge, material practices, and relationships to land and water. Lorne Julien of Millbrook First Nation presents City, an acrylic painting on deer skin, alongside a hand-crafted drum featuring abstract Mi’kmaw design. The eagle (Kitpu), symbolizing love, respect, and protection, carries teachings of the medicine wheel and honours water as a life-giving force.
Lorne A. Julien, acrylic on handmade drum, made with deer skin
Melissa Peter-Paul, a Mi’kmaw artist from Abegweit First Nation (Epekwitk/PEI), contributes intricate jewellery and quillwork. Using porcupine quills inserted into birchbark and edged with sweetgrass or spruce root, her pieces embody both technical precision and cultural continuity, connecting contemporary practice with ancestral knowledge.
Jewelry by Melissa Peter-Paul
Across these exhibitions, a shared thread emerges: art as a carrier of memory, identity, and lived experience. Whether through reflective surfaces, distributed objects, transformed materials, or Indigenous practices, the works collectively frame the 65th anniversary not as a conclusion, but as an ongoing process of connection, transformation, and passing on.
Text and photo: Nusrat Papia
*Fair information: July 10 – 12, 2026, Nathan Phillips Square, Friday & Saturday: 10am – 7pm, Sunday 10am – 5pm.