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.
recent programs
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FIFA Fan Festival 2026™ Toronto
toThe Bentway is a proud fan of Toronto, and The FIFA Fan Festival™ offers a meaningful moment to ignite civic pride and uplift Toronto as a world within a city. For this global moment, The Bentway’s public art programming embraces fandom in all its forms – celebrating the city’s cultural diversity and shared rituals that unite us.
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Public Trust
Sep 15 to Oct 4, 2026Torontonians are invited to make promises to themselves and their community—not just as inhabitants of the city, but as co-authors of its future. In a welcoming, non-partisan space, Public Trust reimagines civic engagement as something personal, accessible, and joyful.
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A Lake Story
Sep 27 & 28, 2025. Procession at 11am & 4pmA procession of over one hundred canoes moves in unison across Toronto’s eastern Waterfront on September 27/28, each carrying colour field paintings made with pigments sourced from the lake/shoreline and activated by the wind. A Lake Story will articulate Lake Ontario’s colour story across the sky and water, amplifying the lake’s own voices of vibrancy,…
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Dominoes
In 2024, Dominoes brought together Torontonians in a joyful act of community-building, as 8,000 human-sized dominoes weave and fall along an epic 2.5km journey through downtown neighbourhoods.
past programs
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Artist Residency
Ongoing, annual programThe 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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BEYOND CONCRETE
toBeyond 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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Communal Table with The Depanneur
toThe 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
toInspired 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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Digital and/as Public Space
COVID has produced the greatest big tech experiment of our time, driving everything – from education to cultural programming, health and wellness to social interaction – online. It seems likely that this newfound dependence on the digital realm is here to stay, and that public life post-COVID will continue to move back and forth between digital and…
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FIFA Fan Festival 2026™ Toronto
toThe Bentway is a proud fan of Toronto, and The FIFA Fan Festival™ offers a meaningful moment to ignite civic pride and uplift Toronto as a world within a city. For this global moment, The Bentway’s public art programming embraces fandom in all its forms – celebrating the city’s cultural diversity and shared rituals that unite us.
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It’s All Right Now
It’s All Right Now is a public art project and a collective movement that confronts and captures our varied perspectives, experiences and understandings of life in COVID-19.
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Neighbourhood Nuit (2023)
toThis 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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Playing in Public
Playing in Public is a neighbourhood exhibition that explores the history and future of play, and its role in shaping decisions about public space. A wide variety of artists, educators, technologists, planners, and community organizers have created works that address questions like:
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Public Space Fellowship
Ongoing, annual programThe 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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Safe in Public Space
toThe Bentway’s growing Safe in Public Space initiative broadens the definition of public safety, addressing new public health challenges and deep systemic inequities to build a new shared social contract for public space.
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Softer City
toIn 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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The Essentials
toThe 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.
active programs
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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.