Immerse Yourself in Miami’s First-Ever Balloon Museum

The first-of-its-kind Balloon Museum in Miami opens to the public June 22nd, allowing locals and travelers from around the world to let their imagination take flight in this immersive art experience. The pop-up installation is located at Mana Wynwood Convention Center, and includes world renowned pieces from 20 international artists. This interactive art experience will take viewers’ imagination to new heights with mind blowing inflatable installations, combining contemporary art with hands-on experience while bringing together the essence of art and culture to the bustling Miami scene.

Over 4.4 million visitors across the globe have already experienced the Balloon Museum’s mesmerizing exhibition during its limited-time runs in Rome, Paris, Milan, Madrid, Naples, London, New York City, Atlanta, Barcelona, and Dusseldorf. The Museum won the prestigious BEA Best Proprietary Format award in 2022, and notably was highlighted as a can’t-miss backdrop in the Emmy-nominated Netflix favorite Emily in Paris.

The Balloon Museum will take over the Mana Wynwood Convention Center, showcasing the “Let’s fly” exhibition that explores the contrast between lightness and heaviness, using the medium of air to represent flight in its artworks. Audiences will be able to soar and travel to far-off destinations, uniquely contrasted with heaviness, darkness and gravity. The Balloon Museum will present installations by Filthy Luker, Tadao Cern, MyeongBeom Kim, OUCHHH, SpY, Max Streicher, Karina Smigla – Bobinski, Michael Shaw, ENESS, Roman Hill, Quiet Ensemble, Rub Kandy, Cyril Lancelin, Sila Sveta, Camilla Falsini, MOTOREFISCO, Alex Schweder, Hyperstudio, Mauro Pace, and Sasha Frolova.

Tickets to the Balloon Museum in Miami start at $29 for children and $39 for adults and are available to Florida Residents, Students and Military tickets starting at $36. For updates sign up for the waitlist starting today at https://balloonmuseum.world/lp-miami/

For more information about the Balloon Museum, visit balloonmuseum.world and follow the exhibition on Facebook and Instagram.

Balloon Museum produces contemporary art exhibition experiences that include the best international representatives of inflatable and balloon art. Featuring renowned artists with specific works in which ‘air’ is a distinctive element. Each individual exhibition offers unique and immersive journeys worldwide. The out-of-scale installations are meant to be touched, lived with and shared, putting the interaction with the visitor at the center of the experience.

 

Monday: 1 p.m. – 8 p.m. Tuesday: 1 p.m. – 8 p.m. Wednesday: 1 p.m. – 8 p.m. Thursday: 1 p.m. – 8 p.m. Friday: 11 a.m. – 8 p.m. Saturday: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.

Sunday: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.

About the Artists and Art Installations

Filthy Luker – Octopus Attacks! Year of creation: 2004

Filthy Luker & Pedro Estrellas’ world famous Giant Tentacles are attacking the Balloon Museum! This ground-breaking design is one of the most recognisable inflatable artworks on the planet. Bursting onto the international street art scene in 2004 the Kraken and its many coloured off-spring have disrupted the artworld and city skylines around the globe ever since.

Filthy Luker – Eyescream – Year of creation: 2022

In recent years, Filthy Luker has created pop-art monsters to sit on top of big buildings, breaking the skyline and pulling faces at the world below – it might not be high art, but it is high UP art! Each of the monsters has its own funny character and expression. For the Balloon Museum, the artwork is titled Eyescream and seems to be hysterically laughing and crying simultaneously, much like anyone in their right mind should be.

OUCHHH – AI Dataportal of Miami – Year of creation: 2023

AI Dataportal of Miami is an immersive tunnel composed of LED screens and mirrors that reflect the diffused lights and forms. Thousands of tiny coloured beads propagate through the tunnel. The result is a magnetic movement that’s hard to tear your eyes away from. With this installation, OUCHHH collective uses millions of pieces of data from Miami’s digital environment, and specifically, the city’s air data.

ENESS – Spiritus Sonata – Year of creation: 2023

Always committed to creating interactive artworks that engage the senses and strengthen ties with their public, Eness created an original work entitled Spiritus Sonata for the Let’s fly exhibition. This new inflatable and luminous creation invites the visitors to feel elevated and connected. Evoking the magical, cottony ambience of early childhood discoveries. Spiritus Sonata envelops us in the hollows of its membranes, provoking surprise and tenderness.

MOTOREFISICO – Swing – Year of creation: 2023

From the conceptualization of the physical system of the conical pendulum, MOTOREFISICO presents their work Swing on the occasion of the Let’s fly exhibition. This installation, composed of a series of spheres suspended from the ceiling, comes to life through engaging interaction with the audience. The spheres move in space, bouncing and spinning vortex-like, creating a dynamic and captivating play environment.

Max Streicher – Quadriga – Year of creation: 2007

Streicher’s work with the horse image emerged out of an interest in expressions of the metaphysical as seen in the work of Giorgio de Chirico or Salvador Dali, both of whom depicted horses and both with reference to classical sculpture. For all their monumental presence Streicher’s works are but delicate skins filled with air and thus are more like fleeting metaphysical phantoms.

Alex Schweder – Aeroton – Year of creation: 2024

Merging the Greek words for air, aero, and sound, ton, Aeroton continues Schweder’s use of inflatables to make spaces that are also sound instruments. Conceived of as a time-based labyrinth, ways through this space open and close as fabric columns lift and fall. Working with German composer Norbert Wuertz, the electromagnetic fields of the electric fans causing this to happen are digitized into a sonic layer using a custom built synthesizer. Faux fur entices occupants’ fingers to touch, caress, and lay upon surfaces that lift and lower their bodies slowly as they wait for passageways to open.

Michael Shaw – Lava Lamp – Year of creation: 2023

For the Let’s fly exhibition, Mike Shaw created an architecturally bespoke response to our ever changing landscapes: Lava Lamp, a monumental, inflatable and colorful sculpture. With this title, the artist refers to a lamp invented in 1963, a vertical glass globe containing a transparent liquid in which colored balls of melted wax circulate. Michael Shaw’s sculpture is inspired by the colors, shapes and movement of the lamp, which became a Pop reference in the 1990s.

Cyril Lancelin – Flying Maze – Year of creation: 2023

After initial fruitful collaborations with the Balloon Museum, Cyril Lancelin created Flying Maze, an artwork specially made for the Let’s fly exhibition. The sculpture takes the form of an immense inflatable maze. With its green color, the sculpture is a reminder of vegetal labyrinths, popular creations during the European Renaissance. Illuminated in places, visitors can venture inside to get lost or hide. At the heart of the labyrinth, there is no Minotaur, as in Greek mythology, but a gigantic reflecting sphere.

Sasha Frolova – Fountain of Eternity & Kaleidoscope – Year of creation: 2022

For the Let’s fly exhibition, artist and performer Sasha Frolova presents Fountain of Eternity, an inflatable sculpture, as well as a video entitled Kaleidoscope. In the video, the artist herself appears dressed in colourful inflatable latex costumes of her design. The dozens of moving silhouettes form a hypnotic kaleidoscope, which reflects and multiplies in the sculpture, creating a sense of a moving fountain.

MyeongBeom Kim – Balloon Tree Year of creation: 2009

Balloon Tree floats above the audience with a crown of red balloons clustered around the branches of a young tree with roots. The unrealistic and unjustified combination of objects is a way of combining practical juxtaposition and combination in time and space in reality, erasing stereotypes of objects and drawing out the expansion of subjective cognition.

Karina Smigla-Bobinski – ADA – Year of creation: 2010

Named after the 19th-century English mathematician Ada Lovelace, famous for creating the first computer program and who intended to develop a machine that would be able to create works of art. ADA is filled up with helium, floating freely in the room, this membrane-like globe, spiked with charcoals leaves marks on the walls, ceilings and floors.

Camilla Falsini – D.R.E.A.M.S. Dove Raggiungere E Ammirare Mondi Straordinari – Year of creation: 2023

For Let’s fly, Camilla Falsini has worked on the surrounding walls and three-dimensional structures. At the entrance, we are encircled by gigantic printed graphic compositions composed of a multitude of colorful shapes and symbols. She realizes igloos accessible to the public and other inflatable shapes, outlining a dreamlike city in which we wander among mysterious shapes: Are these plant forms in an imaginary village or strange inhabitants of a surreal world?

Tadao Cern – BB – Year of creation: 2023

Sometimes two, sometimes many more, the BB series comes in a variety of formats. Here, silver balloons are grouped together, squaring the space with symmetrical, drawn lines. In this room of mirrors and stroboscopic lighting effects, the many reflections confuse our landmarks. The boundaries between installation and space become blurred.

SpY – ZEROS – Year of creation: 2023

ZEROS is an inflatable kinetic sculpture, a work in motion. The minimalist installation is made up of black inflatable circles. Voluminous, the rings move in a slow, undulating choreography. The contrast between the white light of the room and the intense, matte black of the rings captivates the viewer’s eye as if hypnotized by this strange mechanical ballet.

Hyperstudio with Quiet Ensemble and Roman Hill – Hyperstellar Year of creation: 2023

Hyperstellar is a sensory journey that challenges the perception of our place in the universe, leading the audience to experience the infinite size and complexity of the cosmos. The installation is conceived as a total immersion in a mysterious universe, represented by a pool of black balls and a ceiling composed of a sky of balloons of the same color. This environment creates a perfect contrast for the cosmic wonders that will be revealed on the circular LED screen placed at 360 degrees, which dominates the room.

Hyperstudio with Mauro Pace – Perpetual Ballet – Year of creation: 2024

The Perpetual Ballet embodies the essence of air and movement, designed to be the centerpiece of an immersive, interactive space. At the core is the circular, helical shape that mimics the form of a tornado; a sculptural vortex engineered to create an organic chaos of particles in motion.

Quiet Ensemble – A Quiet Storm – Year of creation: 2022

Once plunged into darkness, visitors are surprised to discover dozens of soap bubbles floating in the space. All the bubbles are filled with thick white smoke, transforming them into opaque, unidentifiable objects. Steamy projections dress up the space, transporting us into the magical world of Italian duo Quiet Ensemble. Generated by smoke machines, the bubbles move to the aerial rhythm of a sound creation composed by the artists themselves.

Rub Kandy – The GINJOS – Year of creation: 2023

GINJOS are bizarre creatures in the image of roly-poly toys. They have no noses or ears, only large eyes that allow them to communicate with each other. Squeezed together, they can all be manipulated. Visitors can touch them, turn them around and even play with them. Thanks to their shape, they can be tipped over, but always stand upright in an oscillating movement. A room filled with GINJOS in different shapes and colors are brought together in a room covered with a huge printed drawing depicting their history.

Sila Sveta – Airscape – Year of creation: 2023

For the Let’s fly exhibition, Sila Sveta invites the public into the heart of impressive inflatable worlds. In this long traveling game-like experience, the artists take us around different digital worlds discovering balloons, castles, palaces, rollercoasters and underwater creatures, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. This POV (point of view) video offers a variety of hints from around our world.