Avedon Aging: An Evening with Adam Gopnik

Free, Eventbrite Registration Required
Tickets/more information: theimagecentre.ca/events
Chrysalis, 43 Gerrard Street East, Toronto

Acclaimed writer Adam Gopnik will speak both as a critic and confidante about Richard Avedon’s vision of age and artistry, discussing work as varied as Avedon’s portraits of Sondheim, Levant, and Harold Arlen, with particular and loving attention to the artist’s intentions and his own frequent transcendence of them.
Image above: Adam Gopnik, photo by Brigitte Lacombe

About the Speaker
Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1986, publishing over his forty years more than a million words in the magazine, including essays, memoirs , fiction, reviews and profiles. He has also published eleven books , including Paris to the Moon, The King in the Window, Through the Children’s Gate, At the Strangers’ Gate and Winter (The Fiftieth Anniversary Massey Lecture.) His work in the musical theater includes the libretto and lyrics for the musical comedies Our Table with David Shire and Fairy Tale and Looking Glass with Andrew Lippa , as well as the opera The Swerve with Stewart Wallace. His one man show, Adam Gopnik’s New York, was called “hilarious and wise” by the New York Times and ran for three weeks at New York’s Lincoln Center, and is now on tour from London to California. He has won the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism three times, as well as the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In January of 2021, he was made a chevalier of the Legion d’ honneur , France’s highest civilian or military honor. He has also received an honoris causa from McGill University , as well as from the Rhode Island School of Design, and in 2025 was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Raised in Montreal, he lives in New York with his wife, Martha Parker, and their two children, varyingly present, Luke Auden and Olivia Esme Claire.

About the Exhibition
Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004
For nearly half a century, celebrated American photographer Richard Avedon confronted one of portraiture’s enduring taboos: aging. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon broke with the conventions of idealized celebrity portraiture, revealing the marks of time on his subjects’ faces with unsparing clarity. Bringing together nearly 100 portraits made between the early 1950s and 2004, the exhibition features artists, writers, musicians, and cultural icons including Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Duke Ellington, Ronald Reagan, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Patti Smith, Truman Capote, and the Dalai Lama. Immortal also includes a restaging of Avedon’s seminal 1974 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Jacob Israel Avedon, which chronicled his father’s final years in nine extraordinary portraits. Taken as a whole, the photographs reveal a lesser-known dimension of Avedon’s practice and offer an unprecedented exploration of aging through his distinctive vision.
Exhibition on view September 9–December 5, 2026

Location
Chrysalis (formerly known as Ryerson Theatre) is located at 43 Gerrard Street East in Toronto. The venue is located on the campus of Toronto Metropolitan University. The nearest major intersection is Yonge Street & Gerrard Street.
Presented in association with The Creative School Chrysalis.
Event Sponsor: Extendicare