The Model

The Model is a world-class visitor centre that boasts a restaurant and coffee shop, a bookshop, a wonderful gallery circuit, a purpose-built performance space, and a suite of impressive artist studios on the top floor, with enviable views of Sligo Town and County.

This award-winning building is home to one of the most notable public art collections in Ireland, which features one of the largest public holdings of work by Jack Butler Yeats in existence. The Niland Collection also features a broad range of both traditional and contemporary works by artists including Norah McGuinness, Dorothy Cross, Alice Maher, Clodagh Emoe, Eamon O’Kane, Sean McSweeney, Estella Solomons, and Paul Henry amongst many others.

The Model’s acclaimed contemporary art programme features several major exhibitions of noted national and international contemporary artists each year. Most recently this has included solo presentations by Martin Creed, Peter Wächtler and Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige (2018).

The Model is known for experimental, urgent programming that critically tackles pressing contemporary issues such as the refugee crisis (Turbulence, 2018). Other thematic exhibitions reflect the way in which contemporary artists address philosophical questions that are pertinent to the lived experience (Psychic Lighthouse, 2015, Ghosts of Other Stories, 2016, Future Perfect, 2018).

The Model develops projects in collaboration with artists, and is itself a site of artistic production, with new commissions, eight purpose-built studios and an artists’ residency programme. The Model also hosts Irish and international artists, writers and musicians in its residency programme, recently including Yorgos Sapountzis, Nasan Tur, and Suzanne Walsh.

The Model has a vibrant music programme which includes an eclectic mix of the contemporary and classical. The Model regularly commissions new music projects that respond to other strands of our programme such as Lorcán MacMathuna The Táin, 2018; and Ensemble Eruí The Music has Come, 2014. We also work in partnership with outstanding local music curators such as Con Brio and The Sligo Baroque Orchestra.