Balloon Museum is putting down permanent roots in New York City with a new home at the Tin Building in Lower Manhattan.
At a Glance
- A larger-than-life art experience filled with inflatable installations made from air, light, sound, and color
- Located inside the historic Tin Building at the Seaport in Lower Manhattan
- A fun outing for families, kids who love hands-on experiences, and anyone looking for something different to do in NYC
- Instead of just looking at artwork, visitors can walk through the installations, interact with them, and become part of the experience
- Now a permanent NYC attraction, so families no longer have to wait for a temporary pop-up to come back to town
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Inside DAYDREAM: A Playful World of Air, Light, and Imagination
You may have seen Balloon Museum’s pop-up exhibitions popping up in cities around the country. After winning over millions of visitors with its playful inflatable art experiences, the attraction is now giving New Yorkers a chance to enjoy it year-round at the historic Tin Building in the Seaport, starting July 15.
Since launching in Italy in 2021, Balloon Museum has drawn more than eight million visitors across 23 cities in Europe, North America, and Asia, from the Grand Palais in Paris to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. Now, New York gets to keep it.
With its mix of touch, movement, and play, Balloon Museum’s DAYDREAM is a place families can enjoy together. The installations are impressive without being stuffy, hands-on enough to keep kids entertained, and now that it’s permanent, there’s no need to wait for a pop-up return.
The Installations That Make DAYDREAM So Unique
The new permanent exhibition, called DAYDREAM – Air Becomes Art, focuses on a feeling we all know well, the feeling of drifting off in the afternoon or at the end of a long day and entering a dreamlike state. Rather than trying to look like a dream, the installations make reality feel more vivid and even, a little strange, using air, light, sound, and color. It’s playful and enveloping by design, meant to draw kids and adults into active, hands-on encounters rather than just passive viewing.
Here are some highlights:
- Marina Abramović’s Snowy/Windy/Spring on Planet Z is a glowing, wintry landscape where visitors can wander through shoulder-high inflatable grass while artificial snow swirls around them. It’s the renowned performance artist’s first major work, built around light and air.
- Martin Creed’s Work No. 3883: Half the air in a given space fills a see-through room with hundreds of blue balloons, letting kids physically experience otherwise abstract concepts like volume and density in a way they can’t experience from a science textbook.
- Karina Smigla-Bobinski’s ADA invites visitors to bat around a giant, charcoal-tipped helium sphere that leaves ever-changing marks on the walls and floor as it moves, creating a sort of room-sized collaborative drawing machine.
- Boris Acket’s There, Where I am Absent lets kids and adults lie beneath an overhead mirror, merging their own reflection with a mechanical sculpture overhead. It’s part optical illusion, where kids will no doubt want to stay, making faces for a while.
- Valerio Berruti’s The Carousel is like a reimagined classic carnival ride, with oversized fiberglass birds.
Other installations, including Alex Schweder’s Our Breath mirrored sculpture, Thom Kubli’s bubble-filled soundscape in Black Hole Horizon, and Hyperstudio’s 10 Agosto, a swing-and-starlight installation inspired by Italy’s Night of San Lorenzo, round out what curator Valentino Catricalà describes as a journey meant to pull visitors out of the ordinary, if only for a little while.
Plan Your Visit: Hours, Tickets, and Details
Balloon Museum opens on July 15 and is located at the Seaport’s Tin Building. It is surrounded by restaurants, shops, entertainment, and views of the Brooklyn Bridge, and an easy stop to add to a family day exploring Lower Manhattan.
Hours
Monday–Thursday: 10 am–8 pm
Friday–Sunday: 10 am–10 pm
(Last entry is two hours before closing.)
Tickets
Adults (ages 18–65): $40
Teens ages 13–17, adults 65+, and adults with disabilities: $33
Children ages 4–12: $26
Family packages are available, starting at $81 for one adult and two children and $139 for two adults and three children. Flex tickets, which are valid for six months and include one re-entry, are also available for $77 for adults, with discounted pricing for children.
For tickets and more information, visit balloonmuseum.world.
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