Playing in Public
August 31, 2026
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:
STREET
August 31, 2026
This summer, The Bentway invites you to see the streets of Toronto anew.
Safe in Public Space
July 23, 2026
The 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.
The Essentials
July 14, 2026
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.
Digital and/as Public Space
June 2, 2026
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 […]
FIFA Fan Festival 2026™ Toronto
April 27, 2026
The 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.
Sun/Shade
April 14, 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.
Softer City
April 25, 2024
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.
Neighbourhood Nuit (2023)
August 23, 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.
BEYOND CONCRETE
May 14, 2023
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.
Public Space Fellowship
May 9, 2023
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.
Artist Residency
May 8, 2023
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.
Communal Table with The Depanneur
May 6, 2023
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.
Confluence
October 1, 2022
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.
It’s All Right Now
June 1, 2020
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.