Building A City of Culture

Features | Building A City of Culture

There’s no shortage of high-profile art fairs or heritage institutions in Toronto, but pushing the city into capital-C culture takes more than a checklist of museums and international exhibitions. It involves giving space to diverse initiatives, providing fertile ground for burgeoning artists and getting financial backing from City Hall. The good news? Toronto is well on its way.  

Words by Maryam Siddiqi

Passing through the intersection of Lake Shore Boulevard and York Street, you might spot an odd sight: three boom lifts (construction equipment often found at the side of the road for perpetual repairs to the underside of the Gardiner Expressway) wrapped in bright blue, purple, green and red vinyl with giant googly eyes added to them. One even has a shaggy head of multicoloured hair.

They have names—Trekker, Tinker and Trouper—and are a whimsical reprieve from what you’d normally see on that stretch of the road, i.e. bumper-to-bumper traffic. They are also the main characters of Boom Town, a project akin to “street theatre” that uses art, colour and lighting to improve road safety for pedestrians and cyclists.

Boom Town first went up in 2023 and is on view until the end of the year as part of a collaboration between the City of Toronto, two neighbourhood business improvement associations and The Bentway, an organization whose mission is to use art to breathe new life into the urban spaces underneath the Gardiner.

“When The Bentway was first proposed, it was a bold new way of thinking about placemaking. To identify the space that we have all seen and experienced in maybe not necessarily the most positive way, and to reconceive it as a place of connection, celebration and experimentation,” says Ilana Altman, co-executive director of The Bentway. “There was a real understanding that art could be an important way of continuing that experimentation.”

The Bentway, which opened in 2018, is a public space for everything from fashion shows to mega art installations, like Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon, a seven-metre-wide recreation of the moon that hung under the Gardiner for six nights in 2019. It is, in what many would overlook as an unusable urban space, a representation of the diversity of this city’s passions and skills, cultures and histories, and just one example of a broader approach to art as a way to enhance everyday life and bring Torontonians together.

It is also just one instance of a larger strategy from City Hall to leverage our world-famous diversity to transform Toronto from a city of cultures to a city of capital-C culture. By using art to address equity and history, and offering the city as a canvas for artists from underrepresented communities to tell their stories, Toronto is embracing a transformation that is rooted in rethinking how space can be used and who it is for.

A Commitment From City Hall

“Increasingly, artists are looking for ways of reaching the public outside of traditional institutions, so the public sphere has become a much more desirable place for artists to work,” says Altman.

In December 2019, Toronto City Council acknowledged the value of art in the public sphere by adopting the Toronto Public Art Strategy (TPAS). The 10-year plan has ambitions of enhancing public art experiences in the city, using them to provide a platform for underrepresented groups, like Indigenous communities, and to serve as a bridge for newcomers and long-time residents alike.

The strategy officially launched in 2020 and lays out a plan that commits to, among other things, creating new opportunities for artists to work with the city on public art projects, embracing temporary art to keep spaces fresh and engaging, developing online resources so residents and visitors can more easily find and learn about the art that exists, and proactively maintaining and protecting artworks once they’re installed.

That last commitment is particularly important as maintenance is something Toronto often falls short on—think public washrooms not open when they should be, and broken water fountains in parks. This is such a well-established fault of our municipal government that The Bentway, which is primarily funded through a private donation from residents Judy and Wil Matthews, carried the disclaimer that it would only come to fruition if it were bolstered by a commitment from the City that it would be properly cared for.

Funding for an entire art project’s scope—including ensuring its longevity—is another element that often prevents ambitious art activations, like the ones TPAS intends to champion, from coming to life. 

“The funding landscape has not been aligned with the actual cost of things in today’s world. You’re still getting the same amount of funding as you did five or 10 years ago, but with the same requirements for impact,” says Anjuli Solanki, program director at STEPS Public Art, a charitable organization that develops public art initiatives with urban communities across Canada. “There may be an idea or appetite for a project, but the funding that is needed to realize it takes longer to come to the forefront.” 

The launch pad for Toronto’s new creative vision was ArtworxTO, a year-long celebration of the city’s public art collection and the creatives behind it, which came to life thanks to an $11 million commitment from City Hall. Dubbed “Toronto’s Year of Public Art,” the event ran from September 2021 to October 2022, and prioritized equity and inclusion by allocating 85 per cent of grant funding to BIPOC artists and gave birth to more than 350 new murals, installations, exhibitions, events and performances. There was a year-long gallery space at Scarborough Town Centre that hosted events for all ages, while across town in Yorkville, an entire block of Bellair Street was covered in a colourful mural by Nina Chanel Abney. It was instrumental in helping establish long-term artworks and legacy projects, and was credited with helping the city recover socially and economically from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Bloor-Yorkville BIA’s involvement with ArtworxTO furthered the organization’s goal of championing initiatives that bring bold, thought-provoking work to the neighbourhood, says Briar de Lange, executive director of the Bloor-Yorkville BIA. “The Nina Chanel Abney mural … sparked meaningful conversations and added a vibrant, contemporary cultural layer to our historic streets,” she says.

Why Public Art Matters

Toronto has no shortage of art venues; the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art are just a few of the major institutions in the city. But public art serves a purpose beyond the artworks themselves, and in the midst of a rapid growth spurt like the one Toronto is currently experiencing, art is a means of reimagining community—both its physical and emotional aspects.

Heaps Estrin has offered up multiple spaces from its properties for artists to create their work—a commitment that goes beyond just beautifying a street corner. “It’s about creating a sense of place,” says Cailey Heaps, the real estate firm’s president and CEO. “Occasionally, someone will question the practicality of investing in public art, but we’ve found that the moment they experience it—when they see it bringing people together or adding colour to an otherwise blank wall—they understand its value.”

Public art can shape and influence how urban space is used. In Vancouver, for example, a nondescript downtown laneway was repurposed as public space, thanks to an investment from the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association. Called Alley-Oop, the once industrial laneway is now painted in bright yellow and pink to look like an abstract basketball court, and can be used for community events in the evenings and on weekends. In Toronto, The Laneway Project is working on a similar transformation on lanes in Riverside and Taylor-Massey.

“Installations are a perfect example of how art can change the way people interact with a space,” says Syma Shah, vice-president and executive director of programming for Union Station.

The venerated downtown transit hub became an art destination in its own right with the advent of Unionale in 2022, a corridor at the south end of the station that hosts art installations year-round. Shah cites Aura, a series of digital hyper-colour paintings by Jason Zante inspired by Ontario’s flora, as an example of how art is pulling people into the station. “We’ve seen visitors stop, engage, take photos and truly take a moment to pause—something not typically associated with the hustle of a major transit hub.” It’s also drawing people into Union’s retailers, which now total more than 50 shops and eateries.

The accessibility of public art—namely that it is free and therefore can be viewed by anyone—makes it a unique vehicle to start conversations around social issues by disrupting historical narratives. “If the work reflects aspects of a culture or history, it can foster increased cultural appreciation, especially by making people aware of different art forms,” explains STEPS Public Art’s Solanki. 

Disrupting historical narratives around Indigenous communities is a foundational commitment of Toronto’s public art strategy, including addressing the deficit of Indigenous representation in public spaces. One such piece that reflects this is N'gekaajig Kidowog/My Elders Said by artist Tannis Nielsen. The expansive mural on Lower Simcoe Street, leading to the lake, celebrates 28 Indigenous people with portraits that reach 10 feet high and seven feet wide. Part of its purpose is to honour the Indigenous presence in the city and the community’s historical connections to the lake and water systems. It also serves to recognize the significance of the work from community members like Eileen Antone, who was the director of Indigenous studies at the University of Toronto, and Anishinaabe First Nations and anti-racism activist Rodney Bobiwash.

Engaging with art is also credited as an act of wellness. A 2024 British study on the impact of cultural activities on health and well-being found that engaging in different types of culture had positive effects on overall physical and mental health. Moreover, visiting art exhibitions or attending performances reduced the incidence of depression and dementia in older adults. 

With her work, Toronto-based artist Jacquie Comrie, who recently completed a mural on the exterior of Heaps Estrin’s Bayview Avenue real estate office, focuses on colour therapy and the use of colour as a tool for wellness. “Colour is medicine for our body, for our soul, and especially right now, thinking of a bigger socially focused context, it’s medicine in a social setting,” she says.

The Growing Appetite For Art

There are more than 1,500 pieces of public art across the city, and major events like Nuit Blanche and the Luminato Festival have been running for decades. But what civic leaders and organizers of events, new and old, are seeing post-pandemic is a hunger for community and a desire to embrace Toronto’s cultural offerings in their many forms.

“Our public spaces are sites of culture, and that has always been the case in great cities, but it took the pandemic to really make people recognize that and appreciate it in a new way,” says Altman of The Bentway. “I think that people now are looking for those sorts of new and experimental ways of discovering their cities, of moving through their cities, of meeting their neighbours. And they have recognized the value of art as a means of ensuring that our cities remain vibrant and inclusive places.”

Patrizia Libralato, executive director of the Toronto Biennial of Art, a 12-week-long free-to-access celebration of contemporary art that launched in 2019, is seeing the same enthusiasm. “Feedback over the first three Biennials has been overwhelmingly positive. It is clear that our visitors crave access to free and accessible arts programming that speaks to the moment,” she says.

Still, challenges remain. “There still is sometimes a reticence for people to give up their space as a canvas, especially for mural work,” says Solanki. “That continues to be an obstacle.”

The key to success is to engage, Heaps says, not just with the artist or with the organization funding the project, but with the community that will be welcoming the work into their neighbourhood and living with it. Altman agrees. The Bentway sits among a handful of the fastest-growing neighbourhoods in Toronto, and her team gets regular feedback from community members. “Often, public art is a means of working through really big challenges that our city is facing, and making those decisions or conversations accessible to a broader public so that they feel that they can really engage in those discussions is a benefit,” Altman says.

As Toronto grows, embracing art as a tool to rethink how space can be used and reimagined in a way that prioritizes inclusivity is essential to the city’s vitality. “Arts and culture are essential to fostering thriving, connected and innovative cities,” Libralato says.

The beauty of public art is that it can be done by anyone, on any surface, for everyone to enjoy. “People undervalue the ability to start small and do it on their own,” says Solanki. “During the pandemic, we had a program called ‘Insiders’ where every day people could [make] a creative work and put it on their porch or in their window to spark joy and connection.” It’s a brilliant reminder that in a city of culture, inspiration—and motivation—is everywhere.

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Creating Connection Through Colour

When Jacquie Comrie first moved to Toronto from Panama, her biggest challenge was the environment and the lack of colour. “I came in the middle of winter,” she says. “I thought, ‘Why am I here?’”

A few years later, she was taking an art class while completing her degree at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) University, where she learned about colour psychology and its effect on human emotion. “That was a turning point for me,” she says. Growing up in Panama, colour was an essential part of daily life, but this class taught her that she didn’t just like colour because she grew up with it. “There is actually a science, language and psychology behind it, and how it is linked to our emotions, our mental health, our mood,” Comrie explains.

You can spot Comrie’s large-scale, geometric and semi-abstract murals around Toronto, adorning a hangar at Downsview Airport, brightening office spaces and she once even covered a TTC streetcar. Her latest piece can be found at 1391 Bayview Ave., on the north side of Heaps Estrin’s headquarters. The colourful mural, which comes into view while heading south on Bayview Avenue, depicts a strong woman looking toward the future. “It’s about standing strong and moving forward,” Comrie says.

Its creation was very much a collaboration between artist and client. “We look for artists whose work speaks to a sense of community, connection and well-being—creators who understand that art isn’t just something to look at, but something to feel,” says Heaps. “We strive to reflect the diversity of Toronto in our choices. Our collaboration with Jacquie felt like a natural fit because it aligns with our values—creating spaces that uplift, inspire and invite connection.”

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