Most live events have been postponed, adapted or offered virtually in 2021.

Toronto follows public health measures enacted by the Ontario government to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Check the event website for the most up-to-date information. The content below may be outdated from previous years.

Nuit Blanche Toronto

October 5, 2019 | Various locations across Toronto | Official website

A contemporary art event that magically transforms Toronto’s streets and public spaces into an artistic playground with modern installations, live performances and creative programs.

From sunset to sunrise, Nuit Blanche will transform the streets of Toronto into an elaborate spectacle of thought-provoking pieces and extravagant colour from hundreds of Canadian and international artists. The 14th edition of Nuit Blanche explores the theme, “Continuum” responding to the interconnected and often contradictory paradoxes of life in the changing city.

Art exhibitions at Nuit Blanche Toronto 2019

This year there will be two city-produced exhibitions and a major installation at Nathan Phillips Square:

Queens and Kings Scarborough

Curated by Ashley McKenzie-Barnes, this exhibition will be sited in the Scarborough Centre neighbourhood. It features the challenges the constructs of systematic social marginalization, negotiation of self-identify and radical stereotype within a modern framework. From film and sculpture to consumer advertising and media, Queens and Kings of Scarborough dismantles conventional and societal perceptions, flipping the script, and honouring Scarborough as a hotbed of culture.

Creation: Destruction

Curated by Layne Hinton and Rui Pimenta, this exhibition will be sited at the Fort York National Historic Site, Garrison Common and surrounding neighbourhoods. It features all things reside on the borders of creation and destruction. Inspired by its geographical area, this exhibition will challenge our understanding of these seemingly contradictory concepts not in opposing terms but as extensions of each other, forces that both deplete and feed each other. There is nothing more primal, more essentially human, than the paradoxical relationship between creation and destruction. It is the essence not only of the natural world but our place in it, all of which can only be found somewhere in between creation and destruction.

Large-Scale Art Installation

Visit Nathan Phillips Square to find New York-based artist, Daniel Arsham’s work. He tends to explore the fields of fine art, architecture, performance, design and film. Arsham’s unchronic aesthetics revolve around his concept of fictional archaeology. Working in sculpture, architecture, drawing and film, he creates and crystallizes ambiguous in-between spaces or situations, and further stages what he refers to as future relics of the present. Always iconic, most of the objects that he turns into stone refer to the late 20th century of millennial era, when technological obsolescence unprecedentedly accelerated along with the digital de-materialization of our world. While the present, the future and the past poetically collide in his haunted yet playful visions between romanticism and pop art, Arsham also experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols and gestures across cultures.

Getting around

In addition to the regular all-night Blue Night Network service, the TTC transit service will be extending all-night subway service on Line 1 Yonge-University, Line 2 Bloor-Danforth and Line 3 Scarborough (SRT) will run all night. Weather permitting, walking and biking is an excellent way to get around the downtown exhibitions.