Co-founded by Pippa Hale, Diane Howse and me in 2006, and developed with Curatorial Programme Manager, Zoë Sawyer, PSL occupied a generous 500m² space at Whitehall Waterfront in the west end of Leeds city centre from 2007-12. In partnership with property developers K W Linfoot Plc, we staged 20 major exhibitions there accompanied by an events programme, alongside a dozen or so smaller projects in the adjunct ‘Viewing Room’. We also hosted projects initiated by external partners and in 2010 took part in Tate Modern’s 10^th anniversary project No Soul for Sale – A Festival of Independents staged in the museum’s Turbine Hall. Download the programme here.

PSL featured in the ICA’s Nought to Sixty programme (2008) which sought to build up a multifaceted portrait of the emerging art scene in Britain and Ireland at that time, and in the Art Spaces Directory published by the New Museum (New York) on the occasion of its 2012 Triennial.

Conceived as an artist-led space, with a later shift to ‘artist-focused’, PSL was a strategic attempt to ignite conversations in Leeds about the absence of a large-scale, independent contemporary art space in the city, and to occupy the territory between the existing artist-led spaces and its major institutions (Leeds City Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute).

Projects staged at PSL included collaborations with cultural initiatives including Whitechapel Gallery (London), The Royal Standard and Static (Liverpool), Castlefield Gallery and Untitled Gallery (Manchester), Workplace Gallery (Gateshead), Jerwood Visual Arts, Yorkshire Film Archive, Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg), The Art House (Wakefield), KUVA (Finnish Academy of Fine Arts) and in Leeds: theartmarket/Kunstfreund Gallery, MAAP, Harewood House Trust and Artemis (Education Leeds). The programme was funded by Arts Council England and Leeds City Council with additional support from public funders and corporate partners.

PSL closed in 2012 in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, by which time the organisation’s new home at The Tetley was in development. The archived PSL website can be viewed here.

Leaving Las Vegas, a publication documenting all projects staged at PSL, along with the names of all team members, Advisory Board (2010-12) members, and participating artists, collaborators and partners, was published in 2012. It contains an essay Five Years by Derek Horton which can be downloaded here, an interview with Pippa Hale and Kerry Harker by Susanna Davies-Crook, and a PSL bibliography.