Towner Eastbourne has appointed Martin Clark as its new Chief Executive and Director, the gallery announced today. Clark joins from Camden Art Centre, where he served as Director for ten years. He takes up his new role at a significant moment for the organisation, with development of Towner Seven Sisters at Black Robin Farm due to begin in early 2027.
Clark’s decade at Camden Art Centre produced a consistently strong exhibition programme that included solo shows by Mohammed Sami, Amy Sillman, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Martin Wong, Allison Katz, Lonnie Holley, Jesse Darling, Forrest Bess, Richard Wright and Nicola L., alongside the widely discussed group exhibition The Botanical Mind. He also established the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award at Frieze London in 2018, which has given first institutional exhibitions in London to artists including Julien Creuzet, Marina Xenofontos, Wong Ping and Nat Faulkner. More recently, he led the fundraising campaign during Camden Art Centre’s 60th anniversary year in 2025 to purchase the building from Camden Council, securing the organisation’s long-term independence.
His appointment follows the departure of Joe Hill in spring 2026 and brings to Towner a director with direct experience of exactly the kind of challenge the organisation now faces. Before Camden Art Centre, Clark was Director of Bergen Kunsthall in Norway from 2013 to 2017, and before that, Artistic Director of Tate St Ives from 2007 to 2013, where he became the youngest-ever Director of a Tate gallery. At St Ives he led the development, fundraising and artistic masterplan for the gallery’s £9 million Phase Two capital project, as well as curating The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art. This exhibition subsequently travelled to Towner in 2010. That experience of guiding a major regional gallery through a capital building programme while sustaining an ambitious artistic programme is directly relevant to what lies ahead in Eastbourne.
Towner Seven Sisters at Black Robin Farm, located near Eastbourne within the South Downs National Park, is an ambitious new cultural development that combines a new gallery building with refurbished historic Downland farm buildings for learning, heritage and community programmes. The project brings together art, landscape and heritage in a way that Clark described as an opportunity to create “a new kind of arts organisation,” one that connects a world-class collection and internationally recognised exhibition programme with innovative approaches to education, skills development and creative participation, all within the distinctive landscape of the South Downs.
Clark is not new to Towner. He served on the jury for the Turner Prize 2023, which the gallery hosted during its centenary year, giving him direct familiarity with the institution and its ambitions. His return to leading a major regional organisation, following his years at Tate St Ives and then Bergen before the London chapter at Camden, gives his appointment a certain coherence of trajectory.
Stephen Welton CBE, Chair of Towner’s Board of Trustees, said Clark would bring creativity, expertise and dynamism to the next stage of Towner’s development, pointing specifically to his experience at Tate St Ives and his understanding of the national picture after a decade at Camden. The appointment was made by a panel led by Welton alongside Towner President David Dimbleby.
Catherine Wood, Towner Trustee and Acting Director of Tate Modern, described Clark as someone who brings original artistic vision and a genuine talent for building communities of engagement around art, alongside deep respect within the field and years of experience leading publicly minded galleries.
Towner is already the largest museum and gallery of modern and contemporary art in the southeast, with a significant permanent collection and an exhibition programme that reaches well beyond its regional base. The Black Robin Farm development, alongside the gallery’s expanding work in Newhaven and across Sussex more broadly, marks the beginning of a new phase in the institution’s history. Clark’s combination of curatorial ambition, experience in capital development and track record in artist-focused programming makes him a well-matched appointment for what the organisation is trying to become.