The Bentway offers year-round artistic, cultural, educational, and recreational activities and events, including public art installations, seasonal and special exhibitions, performances, research and inquiries, workshops, talks, and tours.
current programs
Sun/Shade
On view May 23 – October 5, 2025
The Bentway’s summer exhibition of free public art brings together artists, designers, and researchers to explore how new thinking about sun and shade can help cities adapt to rising temperatures and create more comfortable urban spaces.
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Waterfront ReConnect
On view nowWaterfront ReConnect re-imagines the street-level experience of two under-Gardiner intersections through innovative approaches to lighting, color, and storytelling. The projects (located at York Street and Simcoe Street) showcase how the Expressway can better serve our city as a thriving civic asset – both above and below the deck.
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Memory Work
toMemory Work is a mural made up of twelve embellished portraits of revolutionary women and non-binary figures from a future Toronto. Initiated by From Later with artist Rajni Perera and Memory Work Collective, this speculative monument imagines a city characterized by collective care and politics that value nurturing over growth.
Bentway Staging Grounds
Bentway Staging Grounds is a site of active, environmental learning that continues The Bentway’s creative work along the Gardiner Expressway. Opening September 2023, visitors are invited into a living laboratory for urban ecology, with experimental gardens that use rainwater run-off from the highway above to support the growth of flowering plant species.
Understories: A Staging Grounds Listening Experience
This three-part audio series deepens our awareness of the urban environment and offers a moment of pause and reflection in a fast-paced city.
past programs
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Winter at The Bentway
A beloved annual tradition! Each year we’re pleased to welcome neighbours and fun-seekers for ice skating, the return of our signature Polar Bear Skate, free workshops, family programming, art, and more.
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Bentway @ Nuit Blanche 2024
This Nuit Blanche, we invite you down to The Bentway and surrounding area for a series of installations that light up the neighbourhoods along the Gardiner Expressway.
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Softer City
In an increasingly hard city, how do we soften the barriers that separate us? The Bentway’s Summer 2024 public art exhibition proposed a series of soft encounters, where “softness” is embraced as a collective strategy for building a socially connected city.
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Winter 2023 at The Bentway
Winter is back at The Bentway! We’re pleased to welcome neighbours and fun-seekers for ice skating, the return of our signature Polar Bear Skate, free workshops, family programming, art, and more.
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Halloween at The Bentway
Get into the Halloween spirit with The Bentway! Join us for a week full of spooky stories, a ghost walk and, yes, the return of your favourite pup-friendly paw-rty, Howl’oween.
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Neighbourhood Nuit (2023)
This Nuit Blanche, we invite you down to The Bentway and surrounding area for a series of installations that light up the neighbourhoods along the Gardiner Expressway.
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BEYOND CONCRETE
Beyond Concrete brought together artists, architects, botanists, and neighbours to explore the nature of the Gardiner Expressway. In Summer 2023, we re-discovered a uniquely urban ecosystem – where human-made infrastructure intertwines with resilient flora and fauna – at a summer of free artworks, events, and celebrations.
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Public Space Fellowship
The Bentway’s Public Space Fellowship seeks to address sector-wide gaps and ensure that burgeoning talent, lived experience, and a diversity of expertise help shape a more sustainable city. The Fellowship is a paid professional development opportunity that provides resources, support, and a platform for learning, generative exchange, and capacity-building.
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Artist Residency
The Bentway Artist Residency is an annual, self-directed onsite program focused on advancing creative research and experimentation around a specified project theme or approach that responds to the features and/or functions of The Bentway Phase 1 site.
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Communal Table with The Depanneur
The Depanneur and The Bentway are teaming up again to bring you a fabulous lineup of diverse and delicious dinners. Guests are seated together across 10 tables of 6, sharing platters of food as part of a communal dining experience.
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Confluence
Inspired by the water systems that have shaped Toronto, Confluence invited visitors to flow through an engrossing convergence of natural and human-made forces. The picnic table, a familiar fixture in parks across the city, contorts into a dynamic sculptural installation; twirling, cascading and cresting to evoke Toronto’s buried, lost rivers.
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Pulse Topology
In the height of COVID-era lockdowns, The Bentway and artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer invited audiences to rediscover the Gardiner as a shared space for human connections, through an artwork powered by collective heartbeat. Pulse Topology took over a massive, enclosed storage chamber beneath the Expressway at Exhibition Place.
