San Francisco’s Buoyant, Exuberant “Balloon Museum” Made Me Feel Like a Kid Again

San Francisco, California – The first clue that this isn’t going to be a normal museum experience comes when you see the giant inflatable Kraken, its tentacles hanging above the entryway.

That sets the tone for San Francisco’s local branch of the Balloon Museum, a worldwide series of exhibits that has wowed over 10 million visitors and counting.

San Francisco’s offshoot of the Balloon Museum is called EmotionAir. It’s located in the massive exhibition hall at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California.

I stopped by to experience this buoyant, joyful celebration of art for myself.

San Francisco’s version of the Balloon Museum is geared around a specific theme: emotion.

The title EmotionAir captures the general concept, and the Balloon Museum bills the local exhibition as “art you can feel.”

You enter the space at the Palace of Fine Arts through colorful doorways and are instantly transported to a space that feels completely separated from the surrounding world.

EmotionAir is divided into multiple rooms, each arranged like a giant black box theater. Inside, you’ll find contemporary art installations and captivating exhibits conceived by multiple artists and artist collectives.

Each one uses massive inflatable balloons and other inflatable art objects to powerful effect. Many are interactive, and a massive ball pit is one of the most popular — and most Instagram-friendly — parts of the exhibit (more on that below.)

As you first walk into the exhibit, you’re greeted by several multi-story-high inflatable art pieces. One simulates a thunderstorm, complete with lightning and powerful sound effects.

As you move through each room, you’ll encounter exhibits meant to capture a wide range of emotions. There are terrifying exhibits featuring giant, glowing tiki heads, and buoyantly exuberant ones meant to transport you back to the feeling of being a kid (or to delight you in the moment if you’re a kid already — the exhibit is family-friendly).

By my count, there are about 20 different rooms within EmotionAir, and you proceed through them linearly. You can’t go back to previous ones, and although you can proceed at your own pace, timed entries ensure that the exhibit never gets too crowded.

Several of the exhibits particularly stand out. One of my favorites was a blank white room with multiple foghorn-like devices.

As each one blows a loud, low note — that sounds much like the foghorns you hear around the Golden Gate Bridge on an overcast day — bubble liquid sprays out in front. The sound creates giant bubbles that then float into the room, propelled by multiple exposed fans on the floor.

In some cases, the bubbles simply float around the room and pop. In others, they fly out toward the viewer. It’s a celebration of randomness and powerful, gut-punching sound, and my four-year-old son loved chasing the bubbles down and popping them.

Another room features massive, inflatable characters in colorful hues, complete with glowing digital eyes that makes them feel alive. Some exhibits within the Balloon Museum are meant to be looked at, not touched; however, this one encourages visitors to interact with — or even hug — the giant balloon creatures.

Another extremely cool room features a giant helium-filled ball studded with pieces of charcoal. As visitors rollthe ball around the room, it bounces on the floors and ceilings, creating charcoal art on every surface (and on visitors’ hands and clothing–a sign cautioned that the charcoal might stain!)

Undoubtedly, the centerpiece of the exhibit is a massive room filled with a swimming pool–sized ball pit.

Filled with orange and white balls, topped by hundreds of balloons, and surrounded by video projection screens, the ball pit creates a feeling of total sensory immersion as you swim and wade through the colorful balls.

Another especially powerful room features a swirling tornado of balloons you can walk through as joyful music pounds around you. This one especially captures the feeling of being a kid–caught in a swarm of disorienting, hilarious, all-encompassing color and movement–if only for a minute or two.

The Balloon Museum works so well partly because it pushes the boundaries of art, performance, and entertainment.

The installations within the museum are created by serious artists, many of whom are known for their work in the contemporary art space.

Yet at the same time, the Balloon Museum is a full sensory experience. You crawl, weave, and swim through its exhibits rather than just looking at them. It’s totally unlike most art museum experiences.

The museum is also clearly created with the explicit awareness that its many wonders will end up on social media. The exhibits feel experiential in the moment, but also like something tailor-made for posting on Instagram.

In that way, the exhibit both questions–and successfully leans into–one of the dominant ways that we experience compelling things in the real world today.

Is it a problem that our immediate inclination is to post something cute or unique or strange to Instagram the moment we see it? Or is that just another way of processing and experiencing the world? The Balloon Museum seems tailor-made to open these kinds of dialogues. There are no straightforward answers.

The EmotionAir concept is meant to challenge you, take you out of the day-to-day, and make you feel something powerful. It succeeds in doing this. The total immersion of the black box format makes it far easier to suspend disbelief and feel you’ve been transported somewhere else. And with their sheer variety and creativity, the exhibits indeed dazzle and astound.

EmotionAir runs through September 2025. You can grab tickets on the Balloon Museum website.