A pricey art playground is floating into town. The traveling Balloon Museum is bringing the wildly photogenic “EmotionAir: Art You Can Feel” exhibition to Chicago for a limited run this fall. The museum, which has welcomed over 7 million visitors worldwide across four different showcases, will arrive in the city with nearly 20 large-scale balloon-based installations in tow. True to its name, “EmotionAir” endeavors to rouse big feelings from viewers one inflatable at a time.
Since its 2021 debut, “EmotionAir” has popped up across three continents, including stops in London, Paris, Miami, San Francisco, New York and Singapore. Emily in Paris fans—and, let’s be honest, hate watchers—may recognize the exhibit’s interactive centerpiece, Hyperfeeling, a dreamily lit ball pit Emily and Gabriel romped through during the show’s third season.
With soundstage-sized pieces like horned sculptures emitting soap bubbles, inflated spheres bedecked in abstract squiggles and surreal faceless figures hovering in space, “EmotionAir” reimagines the humble balloon as any other artistic medium—a conduit for creativity and emotion. The exhibition will be housed in Field Studios, a Marshall Fields warehouse-turned-production studio on the Logan Square-Avondale border.
To some, the Balloon Museum may feel like a specter of the rapidly deflating “made-for-Instagram museum” trend that swept the zeitgeist during the onset of influencer culture. To others, “EmotionAir” might land as a nostalgia marketing play straddling the increasingly fine line between art and commerce. Brands have become hip to the fact that sentimentality sells and almost every card-carrying adult on the planet is thirsty for an unattainable cocktail of limitless freedom and zero responsibility. To that end, what’s more nostalgic than a balloon: an enduring symbol of childhood's freedom, innocence and wonder?
So, is visiting the Balloon Museum worth its hefty price of admission? (Tickets start at $46 for adults and $37 for children.) That question yields a rather unsatisfying answer: It depends. During its 2024 stop in Florida, Time Out Miami’s Alexandra De Angulo wrote that visiting the Balloon Museum “feels like diving head-first into a fantastical dreamscape—literally,” and Time Out L.A. editor Michael Juliano thoroughly enjoyed “some wildly fun and photogenic standouts” (despite the price) at the “EmotionAir” exhibition. On the other side of the balloon-bedecked aisle, Andrzej Lukowski of Time Out London dubbed the museum a “lurid display of family-friendly inflatable ‘art’” while conceding that the venue has some merits for children visitors.
Will Chicagoans romp around this selfie factory with childlike abandon? We’ll find out next month. EmotionAir will call Fields Studios home from October 30, 2025, through April 6, 2026. Timed tickets (Mon–Thu 1–7pm, Fri noon–8pm, Sat 10am–8pm, Sun 10am–7pm) start at $53.29 (including fees) for adults. Tickets are available here.