Bal Harbour Shops

Jon-Paul Wheatley started making soccer balls during lockdown in St. Louis, teaching himself leatherworking from scratch after his tech startup collapsed. He's since designed balls for Adidas, FIFA, and Burberry, and two of his designs appeared on the cover of EA Sports FC 25. His studio, 12 Pentagons, is built around one premise: the soccer ball as a design object. The Bal Harbour installation brings his Badly Drawn Ball concept to monumental scale: a 50-panel, irregularly constructed ball built from over 5,000 community submissions of people trying, and largely failing, to draw a soccer ball from memory. The most common mistakes, like pentagons touching and warped panels, were distilled into a single 3D object. It's on view June 10–28 in the Center Courtyard, with digital sketching, limited collectibles, and studio footage on site. The sculpture will move to Bal Harbour Village Beach from July 1–27.