Sun & Shade take centre stage at The Bentway this summer
April 14, 2025
The Bentway’s summer 2025 programming explores sun as a creative collaborator, shade as a new essential resource, and brings back visitor-favourites like roller skating.
Sun/Shade Curators’ Tours: June 19
Go behind the scenes of our Sun/Shade outdoor art exhibition by joining a curators’ tour with The Bentway’s Programming team. Learn about the inspiration behind the season, the creation of each artwork, and how they fit together. Sun/Shade explores new ways of collaborating with the sun, as well as the importance of shade, in our urban spaces.
Sun/Shade Curators’ Tours: September 18
Go behind the scenes of our Sun/Shade outdoor art exhibition by joining a curators’ tour with The Bentway’s Programming team. Learn about the inspiration behind the season, the creation of each artwork, and how they fit together. Sun/Shade explores new ways of collaborating with the sun, as well as the importance of shade, in our urban spaces.
Sun/Shade Curators’ Tours: August 21
Go behind the scenes of our Sun/Shade outdoor art exhibition by joining a curators’ tour with The Bentway’s Programming team. Learn about the inspiration behind the season, the creation of each artwork, and how they fit together. Sun/Shade explores new ways of collaborating with the sun, as well as the importance of shade, in our urban spaces.
Sun/Shade Curators’ Tours: July 17
Go behind the scenes of our Sun/Shade outdoor art exhibition by joining a curators’ tour with The Bentway’s Programming team. Learn about the inspiration behind the season, the creation of each artwork, and how they fit together. Sun/Shade explores new ways of collaborating with the sun, as well as the importance of shade, in our urban spaces.
Sun/Shade Curators’ Tours: May 25
Go behind the scenes of our Sun/Shade outdoor art exhibition by joining a curators’ tour with The Bentway’s Programming team. Learn about the inspiration behind the season, the creation of each artwork, and how they fit together. Sun/Shade explores new ways of collaborating with the sun, as well as the importance of shade, in our urban spaces.
Sun/Shade Curators’ Tours: May 24
Go behind the scenes of our Sun/Shade outdoor art exhibition by joining a curators’ tour with The Bentway’s Programming team. Learn about the inspiration behind the season, the creation of each artwork, and how they fit together. Sun/Shade explores new ways of collaborating with the sun, as well as the importance of shade, in our urban spaces.
Sun/Shade Curators’ Tours
May 24 & 25, 2:00pm-3:30pm. June 19, July 17, August 21, September 18, 6:30pm – 8:00pm.
Go behind the scenes of our Sun/Shade outdoor art exhibition by joining a curators’ tour with The Bentway’s Programming team. Learn about the inspiration behind the season, the creation of each artwork, and how they fit together. Sun/Shade explores new ways of collaborating with the sun, as well as the importance of shade, in our urban spaces.
Sun/Shade Opening Night Party
Get ready to feel the heat at the summer’s coolest party! Join The Bentway, Fashion Art Toronto, and Canada’s Drag Race’s Jada Shada Hudson under the Gardiner for a Sunglasses at Night fashion show, celebrating the opening of The Bentway’s latest outdoor art exhibition. Runway shy? Come dance, mingle, and enjoy the show!
Sand Flight
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Experience the world premiere of Sand Flight, from internationally renowned choreographer Ingri Fiksdal. Eight dancers and a 50-person choir descend on a massive sand dune under the Gardiner Expressway for a powerful performance that speculates on climates-to-come, where shade-worshipping is the new normal.
Moving Forest
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A flock of 50 trees in shopping carts playfully travels throughout the city, stopping to create a refreshing shade canopy in usually-sunny spaces. Follow their eight-week journey throughout the city – from The Bentway, to YZD at Downsview, to the Waterfront – enjoying pop-up readings and performances along the way.
Seeing Celsius
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What happens when we can see heat? By adding thermal-imaging technology to the familiar viewfinder found at scenic lookout points, LeuWebb Projects enables you to see the temperature differences across The Bentway space and the bodies that move through it. It’s a new perspective that will shift how you view urban spaces and the materials that shape them.
Bathed in Strange Light
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Working in collaboration with the sun’s rhythms, Natalie Hunter’s photographs on the windows of The Bentway Studio (facing Canoe Landing Park) explore how ever-shifting sunlight shapes our experience of public spaces. As the sun moves throughout the day, translucent images cast down a colorful, slow-moving cinema.
Declaration of the Understory
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Secwépemc artist Tania Willard approaches the space below the highway as a tree canopy, reminiscent of the “understory” floor of southern Ontario forests, where pockets of shade and sunlight shape unique ecosystems below. In a stunning mixed-media installation, floral motifs, iridescence, and powerful slogans offer a mediation on the power of shade as a lifeforce.
Casting a Net, Casting a Spell
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Artist duo Celeste’s majestic, quilted canopy casts welcomed shade down to a seating area below, offering relief from the heat and a space for gathering. Like a suncatcher, Casting a Net, Casting a Spell embraces and harnesses the sun, weaving in archetypes that have surrounded the sun since ancient times.
la sombra que te cobija / the shadow that shelters you
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A geometric pavilion invites you to cross under the Gardiner, casting both a cooling effect and ornate shadow patterns. Edra Soto’s installation references the shade-making façades of working-class Puerto Rican bungalows to create an expansive, sun-filtering threshold, reflecting on the intersection of heat-responsive architecture, place-making, and cultural heritage.
Second Shade
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Echoing both the towering structures of downtown skyscrapers and a forest of trees, Mary Mattingly’s Second Shade combines lush greenery and repurposed construction materials to make a unique 20ft tall urban canopy, showcasing the cooling potential of green roofs, soft landscaping, and responsive architecture.
Sun/Shade
April 14, 2025
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.