It’s a public space – but not quite a park. It’s located under an expressway, with an open-air theatre, public art, a walking trail and a skating rink. This is the radical vision for a new public initiative in Toronto, and the Bentway – which was unveiled as “Project: Under Gardiner” two years ago, driven by an unprecedented $25-million donation – is moving toward opening its first phase in December.

Ontario is calling on developers to pitch ideas for revitalizing Ontario Place and creating new public attractions on the site of the former theme park on Toronto’s waterfront. The province issued a call for submissions Friday asking developers to pitch their own innovative, futuristic plans for the west island of Ontario Place.

It's been about 10 months since Nancy Noble moved from Vancouver to Halifax to step into the role of director and CEO for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Although she's new to the province Noble is not a stranger to the challenge she's taking on, namely breathing new life into a traditional gallery that often feels more like a stuffy institution than an inspired community space.

Before participating in a panel asking “Does Art Really Make Us Better Citizens?” at a Zócalo conference in downtown Los Angeles entitled “What Can the World Teach California About Arts Engagement?” Gail Lord spoke in the green room about rock, rivers, and her habit of living in the present.

City council has voted to give the Diversity Gardens at Assiniboine Park a major financial injection. The gardens, which are budgeted at $75 million, will replace the conservatory at the park.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Picasso at Everyone’s Picasso – a re-staging event of the 1967 unveiling at Daley Plaza on Tuesday, August 8, at noon.

"All arts engagement should be community engagement, because arts organizations should exist to benefit—or serve—their communities, however those communities are defined and whatever form that service takes" writes Senior Consultant Priya Sircar for Zócalo Public Square.

The USS Constitution, the world's oldest commissioned warship still afloat, will return Sunday to Boston's waters - just one day after the Navy's newest vessel was rolled out. The undocking of the 'Old Ironsides' will mark the end of restoration work that started two years ago, officials said. A celebration will be held at the USS Constitution Museum.

The third annual Soft Power 30 index has been released by Portland Communications in partnership with Facebook. The Index is the world’s most comprehensive comparative assessment of global soft power, it combines objective data and international polling to build the clearest picture of global soft power to date. This year’s index features the article “The soft power of museums” by Gail Lord.

The Leading Culture Destinations Awards – or “The Oscars for museums” – are back September 29th, and the incredible shortlist of nominees for the Soft Power Destinations of the Year category have been announced.

Museums and the BBC should be used to promote a “global Britain” after Brexit, a report urges today. The nation needs to devote more of its aid budget to education and improving governance, according to a study on “soft power” by a think tank close to No 10.

During peak tourist season, thousands of people stream into Canada's national museums each day — and this summer is already shaping up to be even stronger than usual in Ottawa, thanks to Canada 150 celebrations. But the spike in visits isn't just about the summer. Museums say it's also about a quirk of the present age: a proliferation of false information online that has made separating fact from fiction all the more a challenge.

It could give a whole new meaning to buried treasure. A national foundation wants to store millions of videos, films and other recordings 60 storeys underground in an old Norad bunker near North Bay, Ontario in an effort to preserve the vast electronic record of Canadian history. The Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation is talking to federal officials about turning the mothballed complex into a secure repository for the country's endangered audio-visual archive.

The next director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art will have a full inbox. Here, 20 well-known Met watchers offer their own bold ideas and expectations.
Attendance, at seven million, is at a high. Exhibitions are some of the finest anywhere. Yet as it approaches its 150th birthday, the museum lumbers under a nearly $15 million deficit; a planned new wing for modern and contemporary art has been deferred; and the Met’s optional admissions charge may be replaced with a mandatory entrance fee for out-of-towners. A new director, expected to be named later this year, will have to plot a new path forward.

CityLab caught up with Alex Bozikovic, architecture critic and author, to discuss the city's architectural ambitions since 1989 and how a new generation of Torontonians view the buildings that remain from past decades.

As prefabricated buildings become increasingly prolific, Silicon Valley design-build firm Katerra hopes to revolutionise the construction industry by using a technology-driven and full-services approach to creating structures at a large scale.

The biggest truck-lift in Europe, built by Richard Rogers for the British Museum, is vying with a gloriously ungaudy pier and a Glasgow tower that thinks it’s a town.

When downtown Seattle’s new public library opened in 2004, it was heralded as a model for the new millennium, fully embracing both the digital era and the spirit of civic ennoblement. Libraries are increasingly tasked with accommodating a multitude of uses, and smart design is keeping demand for the printed word alive.

Algorithms were supposed to free us from our unconscious mistakes. But now there’s a new set of problems to solve.

Munch Museet, the Oslo-based museum responsible for safeguarding the artist’s archive, has teamed up with Adobe, the mega-software company behind Photoshop, to bring Munch’s paintbrushes back to life.

A different type of tour bus is hitting the festival circuit in Sudbury this weekend. The mobile museum, Together: An exhibition on global development, is put on by Aga Khan Foundation Canada, a charity that assists people around the world with social, economic and cultural issues. On the outside, the exhibit looks like a colourfully decorated 18-wheeler. Step inside, however, and you get a crash course on how helping countries become independent creates a better world.

Argentine artist Marta Minujín has created a full-scale replica of one of the world’s most famous structures, the Parthenon in Athens, constructed out of censored books as a symbol of resistance to political repression. Currently on display at the Documenta 14 art festival in Kassel, Germany, the 100,000 books that make up the monument have been sourced entirely from donations, allowing people from all over the world to contribute titles they feel a personal connection to.

Can you trade a smiley face for a Picasso? The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has given you the chance to try. Over the last few weeks, the museum has invited people to text the number 57251 with the phrase “send me” followed by a word or an emoji — send me a robot, for instance. The museum texts back with a related image from its collection.

"Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait," a new exhibition on view at Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian at the Heye Center in New York City, traces the art and influences of an Inuk grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona (1904–1983), a mother Napachie Pootoogook (1938–2002) and a daughter Annie Pootoogook (1969–2016).

Local authorities have been "amazed to see that young women from slums could design as architects or urban planners", according to the co-ordinator of a United Nations initiative using the video game Minecraft to get communities designing their own public spaces.

At the turn of the millennium, the 26-acre Pearl Brewery in San Antonio was abandoned and desolate—a collection of empty buildings and pavement with only five trees. Now the ambitious Pearl Brewery Redevelopment is an economic and social powerhouse, drawing an average of more than 10,000 visitors to events weekly, including 3,000 shoppers at a farmer’s market.

New York-based artists, designers and artisans will soon have an affordable new place to set up camp: the Brooklyn Army Terminal, a former military supply base built in 1919 along the waterfront in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Brooklyn-based non-profit ArtBuilt has launched construction work on 50,000 sq. ft of new workspaces on the property, which is owned by the City of New York, as part of a new project, ArtBuilt Brooklyn.