Organizers of Nuit Blanche, the all-night contemporary art event that takes over Toronto the weekend before Thanksgiving, are preparing an event to handle a million or more people.

Attendance doubled to 800,000 people in 2007, the second year of the event, causing lineups and complaints that it was difficult to experience the art.

As a result, the city has to reconsider the logistics of Nuit Blanche — everything from transit to the scale of individual exhibits.

At a press conference held Thursday in Toronto, Mayor David Miller promised all-night subway service, events geared to be accessible by transit and larger-scale art installations as part of the plan for the 2008 version of Nuit Blanche.

"We are a city that values the arts," Miller said. "The success was so great that the streets were clogged with people searching for art."

Nuit Blanche sets up art installations and events all over the city and invites people to experience them in a single night. It is modelled on a cultural celebration set in Paris and now also in Rome and Madrid.

An advisory committee charged with managing Nuit Blanche in Toronto has chosen curators for the 2008 event with bigger crowds in mind, according to Sara Diamond, president of the Ontario College of Art and Design and chair of the committee.

"This year we looked at the ability of the curators to make it happen on a large scale," she said.

Four curators were announced Thursday, up from three last year. They are:

• Wayne Baerwaldt: curator at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art and Design and former director of Toronto's Power Plant gallery.
• Dave Dyment: a Toronto artist, writer and curator who is director of programming at Mercer Union, an artist-run centre for contemporary art.
• Gordon Hatt: a Kitchener, Ont., writer and curator who has focused on the generation of artists who came of age in the 1990s in Toronto.
• Haema Sivanesan: executive director of the South Asian Visual Arts Centre and former assistant curator of Asian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Sivanesan has a particular interest in the shared colonial history of Canada and Australia and the immigrant experience in both countries, she said.

"Nuit Blanche offers an opportunity to explain things like cultural diversity in art that don't normally get a hearing in public," she said.

Hatt is known for working with artists who incorporate pop culture into their work.

He already has a theme for his contribution to Nuit Blanche — the city at night — and he says he's already approached artists who he believes can do the kind of larger scale installations the event needs.

He wants them to "think about what happens at night in the city, how we feel at night when we're out in the city." 

All the curators emphasized the need for interactive experiences that can accommodate large numbers of people.

More than 500 artists contributed to the 2007 Nuit Blanche and that number is expected to rise in 2008.

Nuit Blanche is scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 4 at 6:52 p.m. to Sunday, Oct. 5 at dawn.