Art With Heart 2026: Where Canadian Art Meets Transformative Care

Casey House Foundation

Art With Heart 2024. Photo: George Pimentel

Art With Heart Fundraiser Auction Returns

Monday, October 19, 2026
◦  Reception & Viewing: 6:00pm
◦  Live Auction: 7:30pm
◦  Silent Auction Closes: 10:30pm
Fairmont Royal York, Toronto
Purchase Tickets

For more than 30 years, Art With Heart has brought together artists, galleries, collectors, and community to support compassionate HIV care through contemporary Canadian art.

What began as a small gathering in a parking lot in 1994 has grown into one of the country’s longest-running charity art auctions. This year, Art With Heart brings together 76 works by 77 artists, offering a diverse snapshot of contemporary Canadian art while raising vital funds for people living with and affected by HIV.

This year’s theme, transformation, speaks to the power of art to shift perspective and the transformative impact of compassionate care.

More than an Auction

The Art With Heart experience begins long before auction night. Each year, a dedicated curatorial committee comes together to thoughtfully select the works presented, with a focus on showcasing the breadth and vitality of Canadian contemporary art.

The process brings together established and emerging artists whose practices reflect different perspectives, disciplines, experiences, and ways of seeing. The result is a collection that is intentionally diverse—spanning photography, painting, drawing, mixed media, and more.

Art With Heart is also committed to ensuring that the artists who make the collection possible directly benefit from their participation. Artists have the option to receive a percentage of the proceeds from the sale of their work or a charitable tax receipt, creating a model that supports both the charitable mission of Casey House and artists themselves.

It is a meaningful part of what makes Art With Heart distinctive: the art raises funds for transformative care while also recognizing the value of the people who create it. The result is a cycle of support—from artists, to collectors, to community, and ultimately to people living with and affected by HIV.

The 2026 event explores transformation—a theme that speaks both to the ways artists challenge how we see the world and to the profound difference compassionate care can make in people’s lives. Among this year’s artists are two influential Canadian figures whose practices have long questioned assumptions about identity, culture, representation, and the images that surround us: Evergon and Douglas Coupland.

Evergon, Lot 41, Dog show trainer Birth of Venus McFadden, 2025, archival inkjet print, 30″ x 40″ Donated by Evergon, courtesy of ELLEPHANT gallery. This lot is generously matched with a $5,000 sponsorship from Christian Vermast Sotheby’s International Realty.

Evergon, lot 41 – Dog show trainer Birth of Venus McFadden

Few artists have pushed the boundaries of queer representation in Canadian photography as boldly as Evergon. For more than five decades, his deeply personal, homoerotic, and imaginatively sensual lens-based practice has challenged conventions surrounding sexuality, gender, identity, and the photographic image itself.

Evergon’s work moves deliberately between reality and fiction. Through a series of alter egos—including Celluloso Evergonni, Eve R. Gonzales, Egon Brut, and Big Hellion—he has created alternative identities and imagined worlds that question who gets represented, how they are represented, and who gets to determine what is considered real.

His practice has continually evolved alongside photographic technology, moving from Polaroid and Xerox transfers to holography, digital imaging, video, and most recently AI-generated imagery. Throughout, his work remains unapologetically committed to challenging assumptions around bodies, sexuality, age, ability, and desire.

As Evergon puts it: “If you are conservative, the work is considered pornography. And if you are liberal, the work is considered eroticism!”

Douglas Coupland, lot 38, Texaco Gasoline, 2005, wood and epoxy resin, 44″ x 42.5″, Courtesy of friends of Casey House. This lot is generously matched with a $5,000 sponsorship from Northleaf Capital Partners (Canada) Ltd.

Douglas Coupland, lot 38 – Texaco Gasoline

Douglas Coupland has spent his career examining the visual language of contemporary life—from consumer culture and technology to nostalgia, identity, and collective memory.

In Texaco Gasoline, Coupland transforms a familiar piece of corporate imagery into something unexpected. Drawing on the bold graphic language of a recognizable gasoline brand, the work turns a commercial logo into a vibrant abstract composition.

The result is both immediately familiar and strangely removed from its original purpose. By transforming an image associated with advertising and consumption, Coupland invites us to consider how corporate symbols become embedded in our memories—and how the visual culture around us shapes our understanding of identity and place.

Together, works like these demonstrate what Art With Heart’s curatorial process makes possible: a collection that doesn’t prescribe a single definition of contemporary Canadian art, but instead creates space for artists with radically different practices and perspectives to exist alongside one another.

About Casey House Foundation

Casey House Foundation raises funds to support Casey House, an HIV-specialty hospital and community-based organization providing stigma-free care and support. Through Art With Heart, the Foundation brings the Canadian art community together to raise vital funds for compassionate care while creating opportunities for artists, galleries, collectors, and audiences to connect.

Land Acknowledgement

Casey House Foundation acknowledges that its work takes place on the traditional territory of many Indigenous nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. We honour the land and the enduring presence of Indigenous peoples.

Casey House
119 Isabella Street
Toronto, ON M4Y 1P2
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events@caseyhouse.ca
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Accessibility
The Royal York hotel is fully accessible. For more information, or accessibility needs please contact events@caseyhouse.ca.