The fair’s 2025 edition reflected a growing commitment to equity and inclusion, showcasing how Canadian institutions are reshaping conversations around decolonization. Photo: Ryan Emberley
The fair’s evolving layout and experimental installations invited visitors to reconsider how space, visibility and access shape contemporary art experiences.
The Metro Convention Centre becomes a meandering maze of open-faced (mostly) white cubes for Art Toronto, and circumambulation is a must: a visit starts with what draws the eye, causing near whiplash and then large horizontal swoops become more practical as they turn into a zigzag. This ritual matches the rhythm of the city: busy crosswalks meeting transit routes, rush hour traffic, the hum of ambient clamor and a nexus of peoples meeting together, echoing what South Asian diaspora collector Anjli Patel calls “a city where nobody is really from here,” besides Indigenous peoples who’ve called it home for thousands of years. The fair bridges differences and reminds us of post-colonial homemaking. While the crowded vastness is common at art fairs, what makes the four-day fair Art Toronto unique is the care and nurturing of relationships within the network of booths. Can the exploitative practices of capitalism, which drive all fairs and the resulting privatization of space, be at least mitigated or, at most, decolonized?
With the theme Generations, the latest edition of Art Toronto offered a pathway toward answering that question. “2025 marks a major milestone in global art fair history,” the fair proclaimed in its materials, with “over 50 percent of the galleries presented at the fair will be showcasing works by Indigenous artists. This unprecedented figure positions Art Toronto as the global leader in Indigenous representation among international art fairs.” While this representation is unusual for a fair, it should be the norm. As the first step to equity is representation, I hope to see more galleries run by BIPOC people next year. That is where dismantling the status quo will truly begin. Also, as Kristofer Sakamoto-Marshall, founder of the nomadic gallery The New Other, suggests, “One thing that would make the visitor experience more dynamic would be to switch up the booth layouts from year to year. I find that especially the large galleries have the same location, which can take away from having a new experience for those who have attended before.” For now, intersectionality meets planning in the many cultures, materials, ages and languages present.
Out of the numerous galleries, because of the attention to materiality and inclusion, the following stand out: The New Other (Toronto), winner of The Next Award by Art Toronto, Trotter & Sholer Gallery (New York) and ELEPHANT (Montreal), whose mission is to share “art that illuminates the elephants in the room. Inclusive, postcolonial, feminist, & ecological.” All three galleries are powerhouses of social impact and conversation.
Sakamoto-Marshall believes that young people are the new vanguard. “Instead of the literal definition of people from different age ranges and eras, I view generations through the eyes of the artists I was exhibiting. They’re all under 40 years old, yet are delving into their family, cultural and ethnic heritages,” he told Observer. This sensibility paired perfectly with the Art Canada Institute, although they likely would not have known about each other’s booths early on. The Art Canada Institute features work from seventh through twelfth-grade students, which was a first for this iteration of Art Toronto. What is significant about this, especially so close to the entrance of the fair, is the importance of the next generation and saying their work is as worthy as everything else there.
Furthermore, a range of experiences enriches the art fair, stemming from the impulse to express oneself. “As a gallerist and curator, the artists I work with [are] also a reflection of me. I start with what I like and the artists I connect with on a personal level,” Sakamoto-Marshall continued. “From there, I think about showcasing different mediums and approaches to make the booth stand out amongst the many other galleries participating at the fair.” He praised Art Toronto for embracing his unconventional gallery approach and curatorial experimentation. While “there are questions surrounding representation, gatekeeping, elitism and the clandestine nature the art world can often be known for, I try to address these by breaking down the geographic barriers to entry with my nomadic gallery model and am not afraid to exhibit artists who are just starting in their careers alongside those who are established.”
Several other unique features of Art Toronto made it pop. Next to the Art Canada Institute is the Joe Plaskett Foundation, which awards an artist $65,000 to travel and expand their practice. This year’s winner, Claire Drummond, was “chosen for her luminosity,” according to administrative director Mathieu Ménard, selected by a jury of people from across Canada. Her monochromatic yellow paintings of domestic scenes, bodily changes and maternity glowed. Their $15,000 booth rent is cost-free for the artist, which brings visibility to their work. She also receives all of the proceeds from sales, a revolutionary nonprofit model in service of the artist.
Jenna Ferrey, director of Trotter & Sholer Gallery, uniquely contributed to the conversation as one of the few American galleries exclusively showcasing Canadian artists. Having lived in both Canada and America, Ferrey curated a selection of five Canadian artists whose work explored themes of water, landscape and nostalgia. “At present, I am focused on ensuring we mount exhibitions that are good and relevant,” she told Observer. “I have made so many wonderful connections this year. I was able to engage in some genuine and layered conversations both at the booth and at some of the ancillary Art Toronto events. It is always wonderful (and necessary) to sell work, but I am excited that the number of familiar faces and friends I have in the Toronto art world continues to grow meaningfully each year.”
Many booths displayed work with a joyfully seductive material sensibility. Some evoked a sense of playful subject matter and others had a critical timbre—both pushing against the overly commercial flattening of important stories. For example, First Nations artist Michael Massie (of Inuit, Métis and Scottish heritage), at the Feheley Fine Arts booth, had a suspended work on a swinging cable of cut-up Pepsi cans, stretched onto a wooden frame like a seal skin, also reminiscent of a canvas. It is aptly titled POP ART (IN SUSPENSION). With both associations, he critiques the lack of fresh food in the Arctic region, overly processed sugary drinks that can lead to poorer health conditions, the construction of art materials and the idea of breaking a canvas in Dadaist fashion, all in one. Similarly, at the Central Art Garage, Greg A. Hill (Kanyen’keháka) reconstructed moccasins, a feathered headdress and a shoulder bag out of Cheerios and Raisin Bran boxes. These works are from the Essentials for the Urban Native series that challenge the idea of representation of Indigenous peoples on product packaging and the consumption of these packaged Canadian/American goods. More conventional materials found throughout the fair were Legos, a reconstructed VHS tape, a skidoo jacket, a car hood, white peacock feathers, mushrooms, photo transfer onto paper towels, pineapple fiber, dandelions, ocean debris and more.
Front and center was Karen Tam’s Pavilion of the Auspicious Lions, sponsored by the Hong Kong Tourism Board. Her intervention of a fictional Chinatown curio shop reframes the fair and critiques its format. In her structure, she recalls the visual language of a kiosk, a cabinet of curiosities or a World’s Fair pavilion. In engaging these motifs, she makes the viewer question their power dynamic of looking, whether they are implicated or detached in the work itself. Upon entering the enticing structure, the question of how the work got there resurfaces. With “faux artifacts” taking up the space, it is in stark dialogue with the work for sale made by artists in the other booths. It deconstructs the notion of artwork made for spectacle and transaction.
Furthermore, the vignettes within the fair also told a wide-reaching narrative that reimagined boundaries with the creative use of floating walls. It felt poetic and democratized space. For instance, two galleries (Taglialatella Gallery and Olga Korper Gallery) shared a wall, sacrificing booth space to create a collaborative installation of a speakeasy—neon lights beam against black walls with a video in the background. Bau-Xi Gallery displayed open storage within hollow walls. The subtle visible storage was in the gallery’s arsenal to show more examples of artists’ work to the clientele or to rotate the work on view within their gallery. Another gallery even had a door that opened into an enclosed mini gallery, hushing the hustle and bustle to facilitate an intimate, quieter viewing experience. What if the very thing that is a barrier holds art and opens up to a world of possibility?
Speaking of breaking down, subverting and manipulating walls, to my surprise and delight, I turned the corner a few booths away and encountered a display by the Deaf Cultural Centre. With Canada having a flourishing Deaf community, it’s only right to feature them in the conversation on contemporary art within the context of a fair. Seeing American Sign Language (ASL) at a fair is a huge deal. It made me brush off my sign and connect both worlds. Two works that caught my attention were by the recognizable Christine Sun Kim. In her signature notation and gestural style, the two works are hung as a diptych (even if that wasn’t the original intention). A half-circle mark connects the words “all” and “day” and “all” and “night,” mimicking the repeated movement in ASL as a temporal aspect. Her genius often extends to the time, labor and tending of the environment it is set. The fair mimicked the idea of duration and repetition. And the large horizontal swoop reared its head again.
Not only was Deaf culture represented, but galleries from New Zealand and Australia to Argentina made the fair a rich conversation with Canadian galleries. In particular, Arte Sur, curated by Karen Huber, “highlights the vibrant artistry of Central and South America, featuring 11 distinguished galleries and fostering connections between Canada and these dynamic regions.” For this colorful and rich enclave, Huber told Observer, she “was inspired to explore the boundaries between arts and crafts and fine art and to do so by looking at galleries that may be based in emblematic art cities such as New York, or in provinces a bit more distant from the center, like Rosario, Argentina. For me, it was important to find galleries that work both with Indigenous artists and with artists within the Latin American territory and in this way to seek out those intersections between artists, countries and traditions that ultimately come together under the umbrella of Latin America.” Arte Sur visualizes the strengthening of Canadian-Central American and South American relations by uplifting cultural and linguistic pluralism during the migration crackdown in the U.S. Gallery Paloma Castillo did not shy away from this political critique. Their walls donned textiles of Donald Trump, mouth agape in pope-style attire and a comedic cartoon mini-me in his hat. Kim Jong-Il is depicted similarly, but smiling and with the cartoon Mickey Mouse as the avatar of choice.
Now, back to the original question of whether an art fair can be decolonized or mitigate the effects of capitalism. Art Toronto is not perfect, but it starts to mitigate the effects of the settler-colonial capitalist paradigm. It left the viewer with important nuggets of wisdom. At the tail end of a conversation between Dr. Zoé Whitley and Kemi Ilesanmi at the fair, Whitley “pushed back on the notion of a singular art world.” She encourages taking Toronto’s multiculturalism to the world, but also that the art world should reflect your own backyard. “Simply put,” Sakamoto-Marshall said, “the more we share space, tell our stories, understand one another and develop relationships with each other, the better the world will be. I’m facilitating this on a small scale, but the more others can do something similar, the more of an exponential impact we can all have.” In the same thought, Ilesanmi reminds us that we are “rehearsing the future” and that while “there’s nothing new under the sun, there are new suns.”
