The Bentway is a new public space and programming platform that is both “of the city” and “about the city”. Through the lens of arts, culture, and recreation we explore the changing landscape of Toronto and urbanism on a global scale.
Discover our shared experiences and explorations below!
program highlights
A Lake Story
Presented in September 2025
In an epic processional performance crafted by artist Melissa McGill and 500+ volunteers, A Lake Story articulated Lake Ontario’s colour story across the sky and water, amplifying the lake’s own voices of vibrancy, ecosystem, and community.
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FIFA Fan Festival 2026™ Toronto
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.
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Sun/Shade
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.
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Softer City
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.
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BEYOND CONCRETE
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.
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Waterfront ReConnect
Waterfront 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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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.
recent publications
Cool by Design: The Power of Shade in Public Space
(with School of Cities – University of Toronto)
Discover key insights from Sun/Shade, The Bentway’s summer 2025 initiative, which explored how design, art, and community engagement can help cities adapt to rising temperatures. This new publication highlights creative, equitable, and climate-ready strategies for building cooler, more connected public spaces.
Rx for Social Connection
(with Gehl and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health)
What role can public space design and programming play in fostering connection and combating loneliness? Centered around learnings from The Bentway’s 2024 Softer City season of art and events, this report reveals the essential role public spaces play in fostering mental health and social connections.
Public Art and Sustainability Initiative
(with Bespoke Collective)
Over the last several years The Bentway has been working to better understand our role as public space operators and arts practitioners working in the midst of a climate emergency. In order to address the specific environmental challenges in public areas and in the presentation of public art works, in 2024 The Bentway seeded the Public Art and Sustainability Initiative – a collaborative partnership between a national network of fellow public art curators, organizations and public space operators.
Dive Deeper into Beyond Concrete
(with Frontier)
The Bentway’s 2023 Beyond Concrete summer season explored the urban ecosystem beneath the Gardiner Expressway, where human-made infrastructure intertwines with flora and fauna. In this story series, we heard from experts around the world who engage with these themes in their daily work and have unique perspectives.