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
Understories: A Staging Grounds Listening Experience
On view now
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.
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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
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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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 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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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. 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.
