Immersive Balloon Experience From Israel Comes to NYC Featuring Large-Scale Masterpieces

A balloon art installation that was conceived in Israel and brought to life in New York City has attracted visitors of all ages to Manhattan after a successful but smaller run in Tel Aviv last year.

“Balloon Story” is an immersive experience set up across different exhibit rooms at the Park Avenue Armory, one of the largest venues in New York. The “balloon wonderland,” as described on its website, features larger-than-life and intricately detailed balloon monuments — quite literally, including recreations of the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty — as well as balloon installations in the shape of animals, various landscapes, astronauts, musical instruments, food, and more. Each piece is made using environmentally friendly latex balloons.

The exhibit is also interactive, complete with a ball pit that is part of a jungle-themed room, where visitors see more than a dozen wild animals made of balloons in every color and size. Sound effects and mechanics add to the experience — a lion opens its mouth and roars, a parrot flutters its wings, and a gorilla waves hello as visitors pass by it. Visitors then walk through a tunnel that is covered floor to ceiling in balloons that recreate an under the sea experience and afterwards head into a balloon maze that is themed around music, featuring balloon-made musical instruments.

One room is dedicated to outer-space and another is themed around winter, complete with balloon installations of penguins, icebergs, and a snowman. Another area provides different photo opportunities. “Balloon Story,” which ends Saturday, has had over 100,000 visitors so far of all ages. It also broke the world record for the biggest balloon installation ever made with close to 700,000 balloons, “Balloon Story” collaborator Dvorah Leah Schneerson-Jacobson told The Algemeiner.

World-renowned certified balloon artist Kobi Kalimian is the art director of “Balloon Story.” In 2023, he created the first “Balloon Story” exhibition at Tel Aviv’s Hanger 11 venue and it attracted over 200,000 visitors. After seeing the exhibit’s success in Israel, he wanted to bring it to New York and made it happen with help from Zev Eizik, CEO of Hanger 11, as well as Jacobson, a Brooklyn resident who is the owner of the New York-based balloon decorating company Balloon Van Gogh. Jacobson was approached about the collaboration while attending a balloon convention.

Together, they recruited roughly 100 balloon artists from around the world, including Brazil, Australia, Argentina, and Canada. The team included Jewish, religious female balloon artists from South Africa and a significant number of professionals came from Israel, some of whom worked on Balloon Story when it ran in Tel Aviv last year, Jacobson told The Algemeiner. Kalimian created the balloon designs and directed the team of balloon artists in constructing the masterpieces, which took about 10 days to complete in total. Eizik also brought to New York his entire production team that helped assemble Balloon Story in Tel Aviv. “The whole place was speaking Hebrew when you walked in while it was being built,” Jacobson said. 

Welcoming visitors at the entrance of “Balloon Story” is the exhibit’s biggest and most intricate piece: a giant-sized, 20-foot bald eagle hanging overhead that was created using 9,000 balloons in the colors of the American flag. That one piece took an entire week to build “from morning to night,” Jacobson explained.

“Balloon Story” runs in New York City at the Park Avenue Armory until Aug. 24. Organizers will host on Aug. 25 a “Balloon Popping Party,” where ticketholders are invited to help deflate all of the balloons. The destroyed latex balloons will be repurposed into dog toys. “Balloon Story” is also running again in Tel Aviv, until Aug. 31. Jacobson said it’s too soon to tell what the future holds for “Balloon Story” and where — or if — it will go on the road again. “But the dream is to bring it all over the world,” she added.

Jacobson is a relative by marriage of The Algemeiner‘s chairman and publisher, Rabbi Simon Jacobson.

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