The 2026 FIFA World Cup, the first-ever 48-team, three-nation, continent-wide tournament, has prompted three of the most exciting museums in North America to do what inspired the creation of this very magazine you are holding now. Linking Sport and Culture together.
Picasso painted footballers on a Cannes beach. Andy Warhol screen-printed Pelé in 1977. Damien Hirst designed an England flag. The cross-pollination is older than most of us are willing to admit, and 2026, with its three host nations and its 104 matches and its football-mad continent, is the moment the art world has chosen to take the stage with the world’s most popular game.
From 11 June to 19 July, the World Cup will pinball between 16 host cities across the United States, Mexico and Canada. And almost as if by design, three exhibitions have arrived to mirror that geography. One in Los Angeles. One in Mexico City. One in Toronto. Three museums, three nations, one shared mania. Or as the Mexican curator Guillermo Santamarina puts it, with the kind of line you wish you had thought of first: "I see soccer as a field of thought, critical and deliberative. A playground for creativity. A universe that intertwines with art, sharing similar parameters, related challenges and achievements, and often, that same emotion: the feeling of being alive."
Begin in Los Angeles, where LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion is hosting Fútbol Is Life: Animated Sportraits by Lyndon J Barrois, Sr until 12 July. Sixty works. Forty of them brand new. And every single one made, frankly, from chewing gum wrappers.
Born in New Orleans in 1964, an MFA from CalArts, a CV that includes visual effects on The Matrix trilogy and Happy Feet, and a lifelong childhood habit of fashioning one-inch-high figures from foil and glue that he has refused, gloriously, to grow out of. The figures are arranged into vignettes from the histories of women’s and men’s football across nearly a century of World Cups. He photographs and animates them with stop-motion sequences shot entirely on his iPhone.
The centrepiece is Fútballet (2018), a fifty-inch-square pitch on which 21 iconic scenes from World Cup history play out at once. Ronaldo skinning Oliver Kahn in 2002. Bryan Robson screaming one past Jean-Luc Ettori in 1982. Hope Solo flinging herself sideways for a save against Australia in 2015. Curator Britt Salvesen has set the work alongside Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton photographs from LACMA’s permanent collection, which is a curatorial decision worth standing up and applauding. Muybridge invented the slow-motion replay before anyone had thought to want one. Barrois finishes the loop.
Life-size sculptures of Marta and Lionel Messi anchor the room. The Los Angeles soccer fan gets their tribute too: Son Heung-Min of LAFC, Christen Press formerly of Angel City, and Riqui Puig of the LA Galaxy. It is fan culture rendered as devotional folk art, and devotional folk art treated with the seriousness of cinema. We are here for all of it.
Now fly south. Museo Jumex, David Chipperfield’s wonderfully imperious concrete cube in Polanco, has handed over Galleries 2 and 3 and the entire plaza to Football & Art. A Shared Emotion, on view until 26 July. Curated by Santamarina, designed by the architect Mauricio Rocha, whose mother happens to be Graciela Iturbide and whose own work treats space like a held breath, this is the show of the summer. Quote us on that.
Rocha has reimagined the galleries as dirt fields, locker rooms and tunnels. You walk through architecture that smells, almost, of liniment. On the plaza, the collective Tercerunquinto have installed Tribunas, three hundred seats salvaged from the recent gut renovation of Estadio Azteca, each fitted with a steel plaque bearing the name of a Mexican player. Estadio Azteca, by the way, will open the entire tournament on 11 June, becoming the first stadium in history to host matches at three different World Cups. Pelé in 1970. Maradona in 1986. And, this summer, the world.
Inside the show, the canon assembles. Maurizio Cattelan’s Stadium (1991), a seven-metre foosball table for 22 players, which he originally commissioned for AC Forniture Sud, the football team he founded for North African immigrants in northern Italy as a tart response to the country’s early-1990 xenophobia. Marta Minujín’s Mi Mundial (1977), a self-portrait in a foliage-camouflaged bathtub made on the eve of Argentina’s junta-hosted 1978 World Cup, which is one of the bravest paintings of 20th century and absolutely deserves your 15 minutes. Damián Ortega’s Coliseo: Diagrama de tiempo (2017), pigmented concrete blocks that measure crowd noise like a seismograph. Wim Delvoye’s Finale II, a football goal made from Gothic stained glass, because of course it is.
Then the trump card. Melanie Smith and Rafael Ortega’s Estadio Azteca. Proeza Maleable (2010), in which three thousand public-school children were arranged inside the stadium itself to form human mosaics of Malevich’s Red Square, Klee’s Angelus Novus and the masked wrestler El Santo. A piece that thinks about Tlatelolco, about national myth, about what happens when modernity collides with spectacle.
And finally Canada, where Montreal’s LeMonde Studio have installed United in Light along The Bentway, the linear park that snakes underneath the Gardiner Expressway and forms, with Fort York, the Toronto FIFA Fan Festival hub. Four enormous LED flag pillars, each responsive to human touch. You press them and they bloom, the colours and sounds shifting from one participating nation to the next, an enormous chromatic ledger of 48 teams. By night it is a cathedral. By day it is a playground for any kid who just loves pressing buttons and seeing how they can change the world around them.
With thanks to LACMA, Museo Jumex and The Bentway
