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
Dominoes
September 22, 2024
Dominoes brings 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. Join us for this communal celebration as we transform the urban environment for one exceptional day!
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Bentway @ Nuit Blanche 2024
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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Softer City
toIn an increasingly hard city, how do we soften the barriers that separate us? The Bentway’s summer public art exhibition invites you to a series of soft encounters, where “softness” is embraced as a collective strategy for building a socially connected city.
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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.
past programs
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Winter at The Bentway
toWinter 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
toGet 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)
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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BEYOND CONCRETE
toBeyond Concrete brought together artists, architects, botanists, and neighbours to explore the nature of the Gardiner Expressway. 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
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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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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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.
