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.
Winter at The Bentway
December 3, 2024
A beloved annual tradition! Each year 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.
Bentway @ Nuit Blanche 2024
August 26, 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.
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.
Winter 2023 at The Bentway
November 16, 2023
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.
Halloween at The Bentway
October 3, 2023
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.
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.
2023 Artist Residency: Dance in Public Space
May 11, 2023
Co-presented with Toronto Dance Theatre, our 2023 Artist Residency invites 3 artists with a focus on dance, movement, and/or embodied practice to participate in an open-ended project that furthers their practice and in turn, contributes to the evolution of The Bentway’s work to re-imagine the opportunities of urban spaces.
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.
Pulse Topology
October 2, 2021
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.
2021 Artist Residency: Art and Recreation
September 4, 2021
Our 2021 artist residency focused on The Bentway’s identity as a public space where art and recreation meet. Featuring Toronto’s own Bekah Brown.
2019 Artist Residency: Sound in the City
December 31, 2019
The hum of the Gardiner above, the rush of passing trains, and the occasional cannon blasts from Fort York make The Bentway site rich acoustic territory. Our 2019 Artist Residency featured Mitchell Akiyama and Brady Peters exploring The Bentway as an instrument. Co-presented with New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA).