Marietta Patricia Leis: Breathing Lessons

The NMSU Art Museum proudly presents Marietta Patricia Leis: Breathing Lessons, a major career retrospective by renowned New Mexico-based artist Marietta Leis. The exhibition reflects Leis’s exploration of color, time, movement, and place across a diverse range of media, including: video, painting, photography, sculpture, poetry, and sound. The exhibition opens October 16, 2026 with an opening reception from 5:30-7:30 pm, and will be on display through March 6, 2027.

Marietta Patricia Leis: Breathing Lessons includes over 40 artworks that survey twenty years of the artist’s multidisciplinary practice. Her work invites viewers to pause, contemplate, and become aware of the fragile beauty and tenuous future of our planet. The artworks are rooted in Leis’s 40 years of living immersed in New Mexico’s landscape, and take inspiration from her participation in over twenty artist residencies in the United States and abroad. Curated by Marisa Sage, this retrospective brings together significant series from Leis’s career and builds upon an artwork titled Breathing Lessons from Leis’s The Blue Series, which was acquired into the NMSU Permanent Art Collection in 2006 as part of her exhibition Visceral Images with artist Betty Hahn at NMSU. Realized through seven chromatic installations, Breathing Lessons cements Leis’s status as a leading creative force in New Mexico and traces her evolving investigation of color, movement, and observation from the gestures of dance to the flow of air.