The best things to do in Miami this week

The FIFA World Cup is coming to Miami this summer, and Hard Rock Stadium will host seven matches between June 15 and July 18, including four group stage games featuring Brazil, Portugal, Colombia, and Uruguay, a Round of 32, a quarterfinal, and the third-place playoff. It is the biggest sporting event the city has ever hosted, and the energy will extend well beyond the stadium. Matches at Hard Rock Stadium:   June 15: Saudi Arabia vs. Uruguay, 6pm ET June 21: Uruguay vs. Cape Verde, 6pm ET June 24: Brazil vs. Scotland, 6pm ET June 27: Colombia vs. Portugal, 7:30pm ET July 3: Round of 32 July 11: Quarterfinal July 18: Third-place playoff   Fan events: FIFA Fan Festival at Bayfront Park (June 13–July 5, free): The 436,000-square-foot waterfront takeover is the city's main public gathering point for the tournament, with live match screenings on giant LED screens, a 10,000-capacity amphitheater hosting concerts and cultural programming, interactive installations, food and drink activations, and — only in Miami — water-powered jet pack demonstrations over Biscayne Bay. Free community watch parties across Miami-Dade at Little Haiti Park, Amelia Earhart Park, Tropical Park, North Beach Sand Bowl, and Palmetto Golf Course, with specific matches assigned to each location. Branded fan events will be popping up all around the city, which we'll be including in our guide to the best events in Miami, updated weekly.     

You don't need a ticket to Hard Rock Stadium to feel like you're at the World Cup this summer. The FIFA Fan Festival takes over Bayfront Park for 23 days, turning 436,000 square feet of downtown waterfront into the city's main public gathering point for the tournament. All seven Miami matches screen live on giant LED displays, with a 10,000-capacity amphitheater hosting concerts and cultural programming in between fixtures. Expect food and drink activations, interactive installations, and a daily attendance of up to 30,000 people from every corner of the world. The festival runs June 13 through July 5 and is free to attend.

If you grew up in a Cuban household in Miami, Álvarez Guedes was probably playing in the background. The comedian who became the Godfather of Latin Comedy through 30-plus albums of distinctly Cuban storytelling is getting the immersive treatment this spring. Debuting April 30 inside a custom-built venue at Tropical Park, Muerto de Risa is a three-hour cabaret-style production that moves guests through themed spaces — El Bar, El Cabaret, El Patio — as stand-up, live music and theatrical storytelling unfold around them. Less traditional theater, more like stepping into a night out at a classic Havana club. Learn more here. 

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.

The World Cup is happening in Miami, and Wynwood is fielding its own culinary teams. The Wynwood International Food Festival runs June and July alongside the tournament, turning the neighborhood into a two-month global food trail with 20-plus restaurants each representing a different nation. The entry point is a physical passport — $25, available online or at partner locations — that gets stamped at each stop, with exclusive tasting items priced at $10 or $15 per restaurant. If you upgrade to a shot glass package, you get a welcome shot everywhere you go. The lineup spans Cuba, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, France, India, Italy, Mexico, and the United States, with familiar Wynwood spots like Cerveceria la Tropical, Ghee, Lira Beirut, and Fra Diavolo among the participants. Collect every stamp and you unlock exclusive prizes, not to mention bragging rights for saying you've basically eaten your way through Wynwood. 

Miami food media platform The Hungry Post is launching Foodball Club, a ten-event series taking place across the city that includes a range of watch and sunset parties at some of Miami's best-known venues. Presented by Casamigos and Buchanan's, the events will run on select dates from June 13th through July 19th. The events lineup is as follows: Jun 13: Sunset Party at THRōW SocialJun 14: Watch Party at Level 6Jun 20: Sunset Party at Cantina La VeinteJun 21: Watch Party at BarseccoJun 27: Sunset Party at KomodoJul 3: Sunset Party at GekkoJul 5: Watch Party at The Rooftop at KLAWJul 10: Sunset Party at SeaspiceJul 11: Watch Party at The Gibson RoomJul 19: Final Watch Party at Amara at Paraiso

Every Wednesday night, Wynwood's PASTA opens its kitchen for a hands-on pasta-making class led by head chef Luis Jose. The restaurant — brought to life by acclaimed Peruvian chefs Juan Manuel Umbert and Janice Buraschi — blends traditional Italian technique with Peruvian influence, and the class reflects exactly that: you'll mix, knead and shape your own pasta before sitting down to eat what you made. A welcome cocktail, appetizer and dessert round out the evening.

The Balloon Museum's globe-trotting "Pop Air" exhibition has landed at Mana Wynwood, turning one of the neighborhood's most cavernous spaces into an entire immersive environment dedicated to inflatable art. The show has already toured Rome, Paris, New York, and LA, and the Wynwood footprint gives these installations more room than they've had anywhere. You're meant to wander, touch, and interact—through a geometric inflatable labyrinth, a suspended sphere installation that responds to movement, a room where balloons swirl in controlled tornadoes, and a massive LED-lit butterfly you can power yourself by pedaling. The standout is Hyperstudio's luminous projection-filled ecosystem of swings and shooting stars. Budget more time than you think you'll need; you'll want to stop and appreciate the scale of everything after filling your camera roll with selfies. 

Two simultaneous exhibitions at the Lowe Art Museum on the University of Miami campus make up the most comprehensive presentation of Afro-Cuban art ever mounted. El Pasado Mio/My Own Past, organized by Harvard's Afro-Latin American Research Institute and expanded for its Miami run, brings together more than 81 works by 44 Cuban artists of African descent spanning two centuries, including nine paintings by Wifredo Lam and works by eleven female artists being exhibited together for the first time. The show restores artists who were deliberately erased from the Cuban art historical record, placing obscured figures like Pastor Argudin, Maria Ariza, and Tony Ximenez alongside better-known names like Agustin Cardenas and Maria Magdalena Campos Pons. The companion exhibition, Afrocubanismo: Highlights from the Ramón and Nercys Cernuda Collection, traces the cultural movement that emerged in the 1930s, when a generation of Cuban artists began centering the country's African roots at a moment when most of Cuban society had actively suppressed them. The tension in that moment is part of what makes the show complex: some of these artists are seen as co-opting a history that wasn't theirs; others as genuinely trying to re-imagine Cuba through its African roots and Afro-religious forms. On view through September 12. General admission is free.

Miami is one of eight cities nationwide selected to host the Freedom Plane National Tour, a traveling exhibition of original Founding-era documents from the National Archives, on view at Museum of Miami (formerly Miami History Museum) from June 20 through July 5. The collection includes the William Stone engraving of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Association, oaths of allegiance signed by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, the Treaty of Paris, and early draft printings of the Constitution—documents that rarely leave Washington, D.C. The exhibition is part of the national commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, modeled after the Bicentennial-era Freedom Train. Alongside the documents, the museum will feature a digital mural where visitors can share their desires for the future of America both onsite and from home and a public celebration on the plaza July 4th. Access to the exhibit is included with museum admission.