About
MOMA Machynlleth, also known as MOMA Wales, is an art gallery and performing arts centre occupying a converted Wesleyan chapel and its neighbouring buildings in the middle of a small mid-Wales market town. The Tabernacle chapel at its heart was first built in 1806, extended in 1843 and substantially rebuilt in 1880, when it gained the Classical portico that still fronts Heol Penrallt. By the early 1980s the congregation had dwindled and the building was bought in 1984 by what became the Machynlleth Tabernacle Trust, which reopened it on 11 October 1986 as a centre for the performing arts rather than converting it to housing or commercial use.
The gallery came second. The Trust acquired the adjoining former shop, Harvey House, and renamed it the Ellis Building after Tom Ellis, the Member of Parliament for Meirioneth who had argued that Welsh chapels should function as centres of culture and learning rather than being used only on Sundays. That building was converted into exhibition space and staged its first show in May 1992. A further building designed by David Thomas opened in 1994 and tied the separate elements of the site together, producing the present arrangement of several linked galleries alongside a concert auditorium in the chapel shell.
The permanent holding is the Tabernacle Collection, which has grown past four hundred works and concentrates on artists living and working in Wales during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is shown in rotation rather than as a fixed hang, interleaved with a programme of temporary exhibitions that spotlight individual artists, and with the annual Tabernacle Art Competition, which draws entries from across Wales and beyond. The auditorium hosts the Machynlleth Festival each year in late August, when music takes over the building for several days.
Admission is free, and the scale is domestic rather than institutional: this is a place to spend an hour or so rather than a day. That modesty is part of the point. MOMA Machynlleth exists because a small town decided its redundant chapel should keep serving the community in a different form, and it remains one of the more substantial contemporary art venues in mid-Wales.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- Check the day before you travel. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Friday plus Saturday morning, which is narrower than most museums and catches visitors out.
- Saturday visits need an early start. The building shuts at lunchtime on Saturdays, so an afternoon arrival will not work.
- Arrive by train if you can. Machynlleth station is about seven minutes' walk, and the Cambrian line is one of the more scenic approaches to any gallery in Wales.
- Ask what is currently hung from the permanent collection. Because the Tabernacle Collection rotates, staff can point out works that will not be on show next time.
- Combine the visit with the town. Machynlleth is small enough to see properly in the same trip, and the Owain Glyndwr Centre is three or four minutes away.
- If you are coming for a concert, arrive early and see the galleries first. Admission to them is free and they sit within the same complex.
- Late August is festival time. The auditorium programme takes priority then, so confirm gallery access before making a special journey.
- Allow an hour. This is a rewarding but compact venue, and treating it as a half-day visit will leave you with time to fill.
Highlights
The Tabernacle Collection
The permanent collection has grown beyond four hundred works and concentrates on artists living and working in Wales in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which makes it one of the more coherent bodies of modern Welsh art held outside the national institutions. Paintings, drawings and sculpture are shown in rotation rather than on a fixed hang, so the selection on the walls changes through the year and repeat visits genuinely reward.
Individual artists are periodically given a concentrated spotlight within the wider display.
For a visitor trying to understand what modern art in Wales actually looks like, this is an unusually direct introduction.
The Tabernacle auditorium
The 1880 chapel interior was adapted into a concert hall rather than being stripped out, and the result is a performance space with a strong sense of its origins and an acoustic that has made it a favoured recording and recital venue. Raked seating occupies what was the chapel floor, and the galleried upper level survives, so audiences sit within a recognisably nonconformist interior.
It is the beating heart of the complex and the reason the Trust bought the building in the first place, the gallery having followed six years later.
Performances are ticketed separately from the free gallery admission.
The 1880 chapel frontage
The building visitors approach from Heol Penrallt is the third iteration on the site, first built in 1806, extended in 1843 and substantially rebuilt in 1880, when it gained the Classical portico that now fronts the street.
That facade is a good example of the confidence of late Victorian Welsh nonconformity, when chapel building was both a religious and a civic statement and architectural ambition ran high in quite small towns. Seen from the pavement it still reads unmistakably as a chapel, which makes the discovery of galleries and a concert hall inside more surprising than it would otherwise be.
The Ellis Building and Tom Ellis's argument
The adjoining former shop known as Harvey House was acquired by the Trust and renamed the Ellis Building after Tom Ellis, who lived from 1859 to 1899 and served as Member of Parliament for Meirioneth. Ellis argued that Welsh chapels ought to be centres of culture and learning rather than buildings used on Sundays alone, and the naming makes the Trust's intellectual debt explicit.
The building was converted into exhibition space and staged its first show in May 1992, six years after the chapel itself reopened.
The whole site is effectively a working demonstration of the case Ellis was making a century earlier.
Collections
The Tabernacle Collection is the permanent holding, comprising more than four hundred paintings, drawings and sculptures, weighted heavily towards artists living and working in Wales during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a collection built by a trust rather than inherited from a founding benefactor, which shows in its contemporary emphasis and its continuing growth, partly through acquisitions from the annual art competition.
Because the works are shown in rotation alongside a temporary exhibition programme, no single visit sees the whole collection, and the display changes substantially across a year.
Alongside the visual art, the site holds the performance function that preceded the gallery, so the institution is better understood as an arts centre with a significant collection than as a museum in the conventional sense.
The Tabernacle Collection
Rotating displays drawn from the Trust's permanent holding of modern and contemporary Welsh art, interleaved with temporary exhibitions and artist spotlights.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.