Check out our ongoing and upcoming events and series.
events calendar
Watercolour Painting: Toronto Skies
Capture all the colours of our city’s beautiful summer skies in this 2-hour watercolour painting workshop. You’ll learn an essential watercolour technique and then practice by painting a sunrise or sunset, completing it with a skyline of your favourite Toronto neighbourhood or public space.
Roller Skate Party
Meet us under the Gardiner to move and groove at our monthly Roller Skate Parties! Whether you have superfly moves to share or are working on the basics, all are encouraged to cruise our figure-eight trail together.
In Bloom: A Flower Market + Workshop
Explore offerings from local growers and take part in a drop-in arranging workshop as West Block blooms into a summer flower market. Guided by the new Step-Up Series mural’s floral imagery and striking colour palette, these sessions connect contemporary practice with cultural traditions and invite visitors into a shared moment of creativity.
Printmaking: Letterpress Postcards from Toronto
This workshop will be something to write home about! Print your own letterpress postcards using two antique platen presses set up with an image and text. Learn about traditional typesetting from wood and metal type, how it was used historically and how it can still be used today. Add colour to your image and write on your postcard to share your favourite memory of your Toronto summer with a friend or loved one.
Hosted Event Rental On the Way Festival
Collage: ReExpressway Edition
This summer, Collage Grad is inspired by The Bentway’s vibrant public space under the Gardiner Expressway! This monthly session explores art, urbanism, and placemaking through collage. Work with a curated mix of archival photos of Toronto, urban planning publications, and vintage magazines to express your own take on citybuilding and create your own reimagined built environment.
Dino Run: August
Dino Runs are an interactive family event packed with movement and imagination! Kids join lively Dino Specialists for songs, stories, and games before heading out on a playful mission to track down runaway dinosaurs. This prehistoric adventure is part learning, part make-believe, and all about laughing and being active together.
Drawing: Art Games!
Cap off Toronto’s World Cup summer with some friendly competition, at the Bentway’s final art social of the season. Join cartoonist Josh Rosen and put your art skills to the test as you compete and collaborate in a series of fun drawing games. Work as a team, invent new characters, and race to see which drawings will rise to the top. Beginner-friendly, and appropriate for all ages. Prizes will be awarded! A spirit of sportsmanship is encouraged!
on view / ongoing
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Fans Can Dance
toFans Can Dance by Montreal-based studio Daily tous les jours invites you to a collective soccer celebration—part dance party, part game. This interactive installation explores the popular phenomena of soccer players’ goal score celebrations through dances, poses, and gestures. Bring your dancing cleats and join the team for this engaging imitation game at the Bentway Strachan Gate.
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Shore Lines
toToronto-based design firm RAW Work presents Shore Lines, a series of modular, soccer field-inspired furniture welcoming you to connect and rest underneath the Gardiner. Inspired by Toronto’s original shoreline, which the Gardiner Expressway traces, these comfortable benches will appear as one continuous soccer pitch along the Bentway Skate Trail’s southern edge.
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Net Scape
toSit down and relax in Net Scape, a new furniture installation from Toronto-based RAW Work. Created using the elements of the game—soccer balls and goal netting—these fun, interactive pieces create the perfect way to watch the matches with your friends at the Bentway Strachan Gate.
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Make the World Go Round
toToronto-based illustrator and muralist Caitlin Taguibao brings the city to life with Make the World Go Round, a striking signature mural installation that wraps the columns of the Bentway Skate Trail, immersing viewers in the iconic sights and scenes of the Toronto that we know and love. A vibrant tribute to the diversity of experiences that make Toronto great, this newly commissioned mural will offer fans a lasting impression as they leave the festival.
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United in Light
toMontreal-based LeMonde Studio presents United in Light, a luminous new installation celebrating the many nations of the FIFA World Cup™. Featuring four largescale, interactive LED-screen flags at the Bentway Skate Trail, the work responds to human touch, transforming as visitors engage. Fans are invited to interact with the installation, celebrating their home teams while reflecting the global spirit of the city.
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A Persistent Crossing
Due to maintenance Bentway Staging Grounds is closed, we will update when we are able to reopen the site. On view May 9, 2026 to Spring 2027Bentway Staging Grounds hosts the final chapter of its immersive installations, where human silhouettes, native vegetation, and Ontario pollinators invite visitors to reflect on their place within the city. The work blurs boundaries between people, place, and the natural world, revealing the interconnected rhythms of built and living environments.
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Petal and Stone
October 2025 through to 2027A 10,000 square-foot mural project inaugurates the Gardiner Wallworks series, transforming this concrete expanse into a poetic tableau of site memory, native flora, and symbolic passage. Inspired by the architecture and ecological communities bridging The Bentway and Exhibition Place, it offers commuters and residents an evocative new lens on their urban landscape.
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Waterfront ReConnect: Boom Town
On view nowBoom Town employs vibrant colour, playful characters, and environmental lighting to enliven the York Street intersection, improving safety and accessibility for pedestrians and cyclists.
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Waterfront ReConnect: Pixel Story
On view nowPixel Story references the multitude of vantages, scales, speeds, and distances at which to view the Expressway, enticing passersby to move forward towards the waterfront, or pause to reflect on its diverse stories.
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Bentway Staging Grounds
Due to maintenance Bentway Staging Grounds is closed, we will update when we are able to reopen the site.Bentway Staging Grounds is a site of active, environmental learning that continues The Bentway’s creative work along the Gardiner Expressway. 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.
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Memory Work
On display May 1, 2022 onwardsSituated at the western entrance to The Bentway, Memory Work is a mural made up of twelve embellished photographic portraits of revolutionary women and non-binary figures from a future Toronto. Initiated by studio From Later with artist Rajni Perera and Memory Work Collective, this speculative monument imagines a city characterized by collective care and politics…