Explore Wellington

City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi is the city's public gallery for contemporary art, on Te Ngākau Civic Square. Since 1993 it has occupied the former Wellington Central Library, an Art Deco building of 1940, where it shows changing exhibitions by New Zealand and international artists. It reopened in October 2026 after a closure for building work.

Wellington Museum occupies the 1892 Bond Store on Queens Wharf, a former harbour board warehouse designed by Frederick de Jersey Clere. Four floors tell the region's story: Māori creation stories shown with theatrical illusions, maritime galleries with a captain's cabin, a theatre on the 1968 Wahine ferry disaster, and the attic exhibition.

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is the national museum and art gallery, opened in 1998 on the Wellington waterfront. Its exhibitions cover Māori and Pacific taonga, natural history including a colossal squid, and New Zealand art, and the building holds a modern marae, Rongomaraeroa, with a carved wharenui.

Space Place is a public observatory and planetarium in the Carter Observatory building, opened in 1941 at the top of the Wellington Botanic Garden near the Cable Car terminus. It has a digital full-dome planetarium, galleries on space and on how Māori navigated by the stars, and the historic Thomas Cooke refractor telescope used on evening visits.

Katherine Mansfield House & Garden is the two-storey wooden house on Tinakori Road in Thorndon where the writer Katherine Mansfield was born in October 1888, shortly after her family moved in. The restored rooms show a colonial family home of the period, with changing exhibitions on her life and work and a heritage garden.