The award-winning contemporary art museum, the traveling Balloon Museum, unveiled its “Let’s Fly” show last week for a limited run at the Arts District’s Ace Mission Studios, which previously housed the fantastical amusement park Luna Luna.
The original Balloon Museum was founded in Rome in 2020 and has expanded to much acclaim and enthusiasm. The museum has welcomed more than 4.4 million visitors at its runs in cities across the globe, including Paris, Milan, Madrid, London, New York, Atlanta, and Miami, among others. Each iteration is informed by the city’s culture hosting it, with the overarching theme of ‘air’ as the sole central connective tissue.
The LA experience features installations from 21 artists with avant-garde interpretations of inflatable and balloon art. From now until March 16, here are some things to know before you go.
Take Your Time Entering the Space
The experience at the Balloon Museum starts well before you even enter the building. Savor the experience, gradually immersing yourself in the space’s ambiance, and you won’t regret it. The museum opens with a walk through the gardens with Camila Falsini’s “D.R.E.A.M.S.,” a series of oversized inflatable shapes, symbols, and igloos meant to evoke a dreamlike city inspired by Pop art and the Memphis Group.
The Overarching Theme of ‘Air’
It might be called the Balloon Museum, but the real ingenuity of the displays is in the ways it utilizes balloons to frame the air. One might not immediately make the connection between data and air, but Ouchhh collective’s “AI Data Portal of Los Angeles,” an immersive tunnel of L.E.D. screens broadcasting an abstract amalgamation of Excel spreadsheets, documents, graphs, and other digital ephemera, reimagines the city’s cloud data as thousands of tiny colored beads.
There’s the Giant Ball Pit of Your Wildest Dreams
Everyone loves a good ball pit. Something about them succinctly encapsulates the wonder of childhood: how your young imagination can take any mundane things and turn them into a land full of untapped play potential. But then, one day, you had your last turn in the ball pit and didn’t even realize it.
The next time you returned, you were too big, old, or sure of your coolness to venture back into that childhood wonderland. But now, the Balloon Museum allows adults to recapture that innocence, which is a work of wonder.
The centerpiece of the experience is the massive Olympic pool-sized ball pit, which hosts intermittent light shows in which additional balls and spotlights descend from the bulbous ceiling.
Beware of The Ginjos
Many of the rooms featured in the Balloon Museum are viscerally experiential. Features inside the museum appeal to one’s senses of touch, sound, and sight, such as a dimly lit bubble room with wet, squishy floors. But The Ginjos takes things to another level.
Visitors at risk of seizures should avoid “The Ginjos,” an installation filled with strange inflatable creatures that utilize strobe lighting and stimulate nearly every one of the five primary senses in some unique way, crafting a one-of-a-kind experience that may be a bit much for more sensitive visitors.
You’re Coming to Fly, So Fly
Consider taking some experience-boosting, buzz-inducing materials of your own before arriving. One “Let’s Fly”exclusive, E.N.E.S.S.’s “Spiritus Sonata,” features hallucinogenic, elephant-balloon hybrids. These things look like something straight out of the pink elephants’ sequence in Dumbo or the Hephalumps and Woozles sequence in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. To this end, just as with those films, your experience can only benefit from engaging with it on its distinct frequency.
A Selfie Opp at the Conclusion
In the museum’s final corridor—just past a V.R. headset experience and before the gift shop and food court—are eight jewel-toned cubicles staged with props for the perfect minimally decorated but vividly hued Instagram post.
Choose a massive headless gummy bear, a balloon-filled phone booth, a cloudscape, LA-ready angel wings, and other poppy backdrops for a one-of-a-kind photo experience. Because if it’s not posted on Instagram, did you even go?
