Lyndon J. Barrois Jr. turns gum wrappers into World Cup art
A LACMA show turns gum wrappers into World Cup memory, from tiny portraits to life-sized figures enlarged 62 times.
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a World Cup preview is being built from one of the most disposable materials in daily life: chewing gum wrappers. Lyndon J. Barrois Sr. has spent decades turning those scraps into meticulous soccer portraits, and his first solo show at LACMA gives the practice its largest stage yet.
Fútbol Is Life: Animated Sportraits by Lyndon J. Barrois, Sr. runs through July 12 and was timed to the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Los Angeles. The exhibition includes more than 60 works, among them more than 40 new vignettes drawn from World Cup matches spanning 95 years. LACMA describes the pieces as miniature sportraits made primarily from gum wrappers, glue, paint and other materials, a blend of precision and thrift that gives old match footage an unusually tactile afterlife.
Barrois began making art from gum wrappers when he was 10 years old in New Orleans. That childhood habit grew into a 30-plus-year career in art, animation and visual effects, and the museum show traces how those skills now reinforce one another. Some of the works are animated through stop-motion, shot and edited on iPhones, while others expand the wrapper technique to life-sized pieces fabricated from gum-wrapper material enlarged 62 times its original size.
The subject matter moves between women’s and men’s soccer, connecting global tournament history with Los Angeles’s current soccer culture. The exhibition includes figures such as Son Heung-Min, Christen Press, Riqui Puig, Marta and Lionel Messi, placing contemporary stars alongside iconic World Cup moments from nearly a century of competition. That range gives the show a documentary edge even when the medium is tiny, handmade and rooted in personal memory.
Barrois, an award-winning animator and visual-effects artist, has turned a childhood craft into a museum-scale statement about labor, craft and remembrance. In a culture dominated by mass production and fast consumption, his wrappers ask viewers to look again at what gets thrown away and what can be preserved. The result is a show that treats sport not just as spectacle, but as history worth rebuilding by hand, one scrap at a time.
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