Celebrate Canadian artists at the 2025 Toronto Outdoor Art Fair

Celebrating our national identity has never been so trendy, and interest and excitement in Canadian unity is soaring. This year’s Toronto Outdoor Art Fair (TOAF) is capturing that raw, eclectic energy from coast to coast and remains one of the best ways to savour and support homegrown Canadian talent.

Celebrating its 64th year, TOAF, running from July 11 to 13, will fill Nathan Phillips Square with more than 400 artists for a weekend of free entertainment, installations, guided tours, activities for the whole family and a new curated showcase, The Land and Sea Bind Us, showcasing emerging artists from Atlantic Canada.

Boasting a huge roster of local talent, the fair will also welcome more than 70 out-of-province artists to Toronto this year online and in person—the largest national representation in the fair’s history—and hand out more than $45,000+ in awards across multiple disciplines, making it the most extensive art-fair awards program in North America.

“Our mission has always been to champion independent Canadian artists, and that commitment is more important now than ever,” says TOAF executive director Anahita Azrahimi.

In addition to providing travel support, TOAF offers bursaries and outreach programs designed to help as many Canadian artists as possible participate in the event. “As Canada’s leading and longest-running contemporary outdoor art fair, TOAF offers artists a unique opportunity to showcase their work in the heart of downtown Toronto, in front of over 170,000 art lovers, collectors and curators,” Azrahimi says. “It’s a launchpad, a place where emerging artists are discovered and established artists expand their reach.”

Torontonian Matthew Walton leapt off that very launch pad in 2024, when he decided to take his personal passion public for the first time. “Applying to TOAF marked the beginning of a new journey for me,” Walton says. “At the time, I felt stuck in a job that didn’t offer me enough of a creative outlet, and making the work that I ultimately showed at TOAF last year brought me out of a depression and reignited the artistic passion inside me.”

Walton’s bold, colourful, often-cheeky mixed-media pieces consist of figures drawn with pastels and coloured pencil over a watercolour wash, then encased with a flat acrylic background. “I like to explore moments of personal intimacy with self, as well as interpersonal intimacy, and blur that line between private and public space through my work,” he says. “I usually harvest these moments from my own lived experience as a gay man. Each work inherently celebrates the quiet charm of every-day queerness.”

His participation in TOAF 2024 sparked Walton’s transition to a career as an artist and earned him TOAF’s award for Best of 2D Works last year. “The award heightened my success at the fair, for sure,” Walton says. “It also felt like a major stamp of approval, a sign of encouragement to continue my art practice and pursue my career as an artist.”

Just as meaningful? The enthusiastic support Walton says he received from fair visitors.

“I made that work in the solitude of my kitchen, not really knowing if anyone else would enjoy it, but I made it for me because it was what I wanted to see,” Walton says. “The overwhelmingly positive response from people across all ages, races and genders meant the world to me. I was told by someone that they very rarely saw themselves in work made by people like me, but they did in mine. That was a special thing to hear and reminded me of what a great tool for connection art can be.”

Walton is among the hundreds of Canadian artists participating in TOAF in 2025 and is grateful for the exposure and connection that the fair provides.

“Canada is such a vast country, so to condense that distance by congregating at Nathan Phillips Square with artists from coast to coast to coast last year was an incredible experience,” he says. “As an art lover, it was just so exciting to see what all of these artists from across the nation have been creating, all in one place. As an artist, it made me proud to be part of this diverse and expansive art community that calls Canada home.”

To explore the TOAF 2025 programming, the artists and more, visit toaf.ca.