Looking back and also forwards as gallery celebrates centenary in Eastbourne

As Joe Hill, director and CEO, says, it is a great opportunity to look back at the gallery's history but also to look forward to its future – and the consequences of both for Eastbourne are hugely positive. As part of the celebrations, this autumn, Towner Eastbourne will host the Turner Prize, the world’s leading prize for contemporary art – and already the knock-on effects are being felt.

“We had the tenth anniversary of this building in 2019 and then we had the pandemic in the middle but now we have the centenary the other side of that and it's fantastic to have this real boost for Eastbourne in 2023. And it is already having an impact. Something like the Turner Prize is great for the town and from a business point of view it will have huge consequences helping the hotels and the restaurants.

“I think already it is already making a difference, and we are talking about perceptions as well. We are already shaking some people’s perceptions of Eastbourne as a rather sleepy retirement town that does not really have very much for the under-50s. We are challenging that. All this is a great catalyst for people to think about Eastbourne differently. With the Turner Prize we will be focusing on young people and we will have a very ambitious schools programme to go with it. When I arrived in 2018 we were already talking about the centenary as being a major milestone we could be working towards and that was very helpful from a strategic point of view to have these moments where you can reassess where you are. Almost from day one we were looking towards that centenary and trying to imagine what it would feel like and how we would celebrate and the main point was really thinking about the vision for the whole organisation generally, the vision that it started with – that it is an organisation which is very much a community asset that people can feel pride in and that we can use for all sorts of different activities, that it should be a hub for the whole town and further afield which is why we wanted the celebration to be a community-wide celebration. We wanted something that would go beyond the walls and something that everybody could get involved with. We started with huge huge plans and then reality filtered through but the programme that we have got is fantastic and allows us to be really ambitious as a gallery and also to think about our place in the community.”

100 years ago the gallery began with just 22 works of art. Now it boasts more than 5,000. The point is that it is a living collection which is precisely the name given to one of this year’s key exhibitions – TOWNER 100: The Living Collection, now up and running, free admission, Gallery 1. From 1923 the collection was housed inside Towner’s first home, an 18th century manor house, which shaped the collection for almost 90 years. In 2009 Towner moved into its purpose-built modernist style gallery. The Living Collection considers Towner’s broad and varied history of collecting and exhibiting over the past 100 years through a selection of paintings, prints and artefacts.