If you want relief from the growing national crisis — and at this point, who doesn’t? — the Balloon Museum, which opened last Thursday at the Fields Studios, 2828 N. Pulaski Road, offers escape for an hour or two to a place where inflation is a good thing, and denizens are puffed up only with air, not ego and malice.
“EmotionAir: Art You Can Feel” is less museum, more sprawling play zone along the lines of Meow Wolf, the “artertainment” immersive experiences out West whose purpose is to give visitors something big, colorful and unusual to pose in front of on Instagram.
Workers were busily tacking down carpets when I got a sneak peek last Wednesday, which might have detracted from the overall effect. Though I also didn’t have to pony up $39.83, the weekday toll for teens and seniors (more for adults, and more on the weekend) which no doubt honed my sense of childish wonder. Kids under 3 are free.
I admired the colorful benignity of ENESS’ “Airship Orchestra,” the first of 18 tableaus — artworks if you’re feeling generous — 16 stolid, striped, violet and blue squashlike balloons, some with bunny ears, all with eyes, to get visitors off on a cheery, anthropomorphic foot.
Then came large grey cylinders that slowly collapse — rather like our democratic norms — and reinflate, a hopeful touch. Leading into “ADA,” by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, a white room with an enormous clear helium-filled balloon, studded with charcoal sticks like a sea mine, a “self-forming artwork” that will cover the walls with black streaks by the time the show ends April 6. It did make me think of an actual artist: Iceland’s Olafur Eliasson, who had a diverting show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009.
The enormous ball pit is clearly a highlight, though concern that I not lose my phone in the thing squelched whatever gleeful abandon one is supposed to experience. Here being ahead of the crowd helped. One visitor during the Balloon Museum’s New York run reported the wait to get into the pit “felt like forever.”
“Invisible Ballet,” a storm of silver balloons, is disorienting fun. I felt compelled to take a video and toss it onto social media, where the first response taught me a new term, “timeline cleanse,” meaning something that isn’t an Edvard Munch scream of shock at the latest offense against social decency.
Fun environments at the Balloon Museum, opening on North Pulaski Road Thursday.
— Neil Steinberg (@neilsteinberg.bsky.social) 2025-10-29T18:41:07.282Z
Next came Momoyo Torimitsu’s “Somehow, I Don’t Feel Comfortable,” the one display that — in my opinion — rose to the level of actual art. Truly, you could cart it over to the MCA and it would fit right in.
A trio of enormous inflatable pink rabbits, crammed against a too low ceiling, “Somehow…” is a comment on kawaii, the culture of cuteness that has gripped Japan for the past half century. Kawaii sells $4 billion a year worth of Hello Kitty stickers and backpacks. But it is also the happy face on a straight jacket of enforced helplessness and passivity, an attractive trap of being “something innocent, pure and small that should be protected” that many women spend their lives trying to escape.
I’m not the target audience for the Balloon Museum. My takeaway is that the ideal customer would be (a) 7 years old — really, it’s the sort of thing a child might savor for the rest of her life, being let loose in a wild landscape of whimsy, light and music — (b) high or (c) on a date.
I should warn you that there is a background chatter of airy pop philosophizing that might annoy some, if they pay any attention to it. “Each memory becomes a bridge between who we are and what we feel,” a canned voice informed us. But I easily tuned it out, and imagine most visitors will do the same. These immersive experiences are something of a trend, particularly in theater, and I suppose alarm could be in order if we consider them to represent our aesthetic future.
“In Italy we are full of museums and historical monuments,” said my enthusiastic tour guide, Maristella Burchietti. “But I think the people want to live the heart in a new way. More interactive, more fun.”
Do we? The Art Institute seems safe, for now. But as Seneca says, houses crack before they crumble.
“We wanted to create a meeting with the people, so you can live the art, you can taste, you can experience with the artwork,” said Burchietti. “Not only to see, but you can be part of the installation and find out a different way to live.”
Whatever that different way to live may be — amongst balloons? — eluded me. But the Balloon Museum certainly is a distracting experience, and for some that will no doubt be enough, maybe even plenty.