Every second Friday during the summer months you will find a tiny village of tents in Chisholm Park in Antigonish. A gaggle of local artists can be found there—both well-known professional artists and aspiring youth—selling an eclectic mix of wares from jewelry to paintings. The nearby gazebo sees a steady stream of musicians and dancers take the stage. It’s a highly visible affair, impossible to miss if you happen to be driving through Antigonish when it’s on. But what exactly is this art fair? Who runs it and where did it come from?

We sat down with Aida Arnold and Beth Latwaitis to talk about the origins of the Antigonish Art Fair, now in its fourteenth year, running five times a season on the park grounds that just so happen to be named in honour of Beth’s father, the former Mayor Colin Chisholm. Her father had passed by the time the art fair began, but she says he would have loved it — he was a community man through and through.

The Art Fair is an outdoor evening market for artists, musicians, makers, and performers, held every second Friday in the summer months, with the park gazebo and surrounding grounds forming a natural stage and gathering place. Weather is the only real variable; if it turns, the event moves to the 4-H barn. But both Aida and Beth are clear that Chisholm Park is the soul of the fair, and the reason for its success.

David Miller

You can’t tell the story of the Art Fair’s origins without telling David’s story.

David Miller approached Beth in 2012 with an idea: a summer event in Chisholm Park that would bring the community together and draw people from outside. He had the vision and the energy; she had the organizational capacity. Together they built the first art fair out of nothing, just an idea and an ability to wrangle the people they needed to make it happen.

David had run the McDonalds on James Street for 23 years. He had an MBA, understood what money moving through a community could do to improve people’s lives, and spent a significant portion of those restaurant years talking to travelers passing through town—people headed to Cape Breton who’d stopped for food—telling them about Antigonish and giving them reasons to drive down Main Street.

With a shared love of art and a desire to bring people from both inside and outside the community together, Beth and David tapped local artists and persuaded local politicians to back the idea. After a successful grand opening, the Art Fair has been back every summer (with the exception of a small break during COVID) and there’s no indication that it’s stopping anytime soon.

What Makes It Work

One of the Art Fair’s quieter distinctions is that it doesn’t separate the well-known from the brand new. At the last fair, established artist Anna Syperek was showing here work in one tent, while in another, a teenager was selling handmade cards — maybe their first public showing of anything. These artists can coexist here in a way that doesn’t happen at other art events, and the downstream effects of that for a young artist truly matter. Several people who showed at the early fairs have since gone on to pursue art studies. Some come back. Most have moved away, but they remember.

Aida has stepped into the role of booking musical artists to play during the event. She scouts performers at the Saturday farmers market — she’ll approach someone she hears, hand them a card, and a few have shown up to perform. Jazz students from StFX who stay in Antigonish over summer have performed. Theatre Antigonish cast members have been invited. Volunteer MCs anchor the evening. Performers are paid — something Justin notes is unusual for a volunteer-run community organization of this size. Five young people are employed each fair to put up and take down the tents and distribute tables and chairs.

The unusual 50/50 raffle deserves a mention. It’s a raffle where you indeed win money, but with a simple caveat: you have to spend it at the art fair.

The Arts House

The second major strand of this story is the Arts House — the small building near Boston Pizza that started life as the Antigonish Tourism office, a moveable structure that was deposited on whatever free land the tourism bureau could find.

Beth and David had already been using the building during the winter months between art fairs, renting it for offseason activities and storage. When it came up for purchase, they made a rapid decision and bought it. The vision was a space where artists could teach and be paid for sharing their knowledge, where people could take lessons in anything from watercolour to music. It was another lurch into the unknown, as Beth describes it.

The pottery program is now the most developed offering. The Dr. J high school donated six pottery wheels and a kiln they no longer needed. Home Hardware donated an adjacent structure to house the kiln. What started as noticing consistent demand for pottery classes has become a full studio with kiln on site.

The building itself sits on land owned by the corporation that owns the mall (Canadian Tire), which donates the space — a contribution Aida describes as huge, huge, huge. The Arts House has since hired a part-time coordinator and continues to run classes through fall and winter when the outdoor events stop.

The Flowers

There’s a thread in the conversation about Aida and David’s overarching desire to bring more beauty and art to the town. Long before the Art Fair took shape, Aida and a group of about six friends looked at what Charlottetown had done with plantings and street-level gardens and asked why Antigonish couldn’t do the same. They lobbied businesses to install iron hangers on their buildings. Pleasant Valley Nurseries donated flowers basket to hang from them. Somebody had seen baskets on bridges in another city and suggested trying it here. That’s how the bridges got their baskets.

Expanding the Table

One of Aida’s ongoing projects for the Art Fair is broader cultural representation, in both food and performance. Filipino food has appeared at the fair, and Syrian food, and Mexican. A group of Filipino children performed a pop music dance in the walkway between the two sections of the park, which Aida describes with visible delight. She is working toward featuring the Dabke; a traditional line dance from Syria and other Middle Eastern communities, performed at weddings and celebrations.

One More This Summer

The final Art Fair of the 2026 season is Friday, August 21st at Chisholm Park. All are welcome. If it rains, it moves to the 4-H barn, and Beth and Aida will have been watching the Weather Network closely enough to tell you by Thursday afternoon where it will be.

The Arts House accepts class registrations year-round. Both organizations are supported by the town and county through community grants, and by the generosity of a long list of individuals and businesses that both women acknowledge would take the rest of the podcast to properly thank.

The closing words in the episode belong to Beth, and they’re about David: He was brilliant, but he was kind. He was creative, but he wanted to get things done. He had a wonderful mix of humanity. Beth went from a single coffee and conversation about an art fair idea to years of work alongside him. And Aida has been there all along, happy to continue David’s legacy of bringing more art, beauty, and joy to Antigonish.

Thanks to Whidden Park Campground and Healing Arts Reconciling People (HARP): The People’s Press, Community Sponsors of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

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