Finding space to breathe

For Marietta Patricia Leis, color can hold an entire place. 

The deep blue of Crater Lake, the endless green of northern Thailand and the darkness of an Icelandic winter have followed the New Mexico artist into a body of work spanning decades, continents and mediums. This fall, more than 40 of those works will come together at the New Mexico State University Art Museum for “Marietta Patricia Leis: Breathing Lessons.” 

Opening Oct. 16, the retrospective surveys 20 years of Leis’ multidisciplinary practice through painting, photography, sculpture, video, poetry and sound. Curated by Marisa Sage, executive director of the New Mexico Museum of Art, the exhibition is organized through seven chromatic installations that move through different periods of Leis’ career. 

The title reaches back to Leis’ own history with NMSU. In 2005, she exhibited alongside New Mexico photographer Betty Hahn at the university. NMSU acquired “Breathing Lessons,” an installation of five paintings from Leis’ “The Blue Series,” for its permanent collection in 2006. 

Two decades later, Sage returned to the name while developing the retrospective. 

“She said that says so much about my work,” Leis said. “At that time, I kind of paused and started to focus on really living more attentively in the present.” 

That attention to her surroundings began much earlier. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1938 and raised in East Orange, Leis grew up surrounded by creativity. Her mother was a commercial artist, while her grandmother introduced her to a different kind of artistic education through her garden and kitchen. 

“She was very sensual,” Leis said. “Her cooking and her garden and the colors in her garden and the aroma of her cooking, everything was working with her senses.” 

Leis remembers picking flowers from the garden and watching her grandmother cook with ingredients grown there. Those experiences gave her an early appreciation for things that could be felt through the senses rather than simply seen. 

“I think that set me on a path of really appreciating those things in my life,” Leis said. “It’s a constant in my life that I can go back to and touch base with.” 

Leis first found her own creative language through ballet, performing throughout her childhood, teenage years, and early 20s. Acting followed before visual art became her primary focus in her 30s. 

After living in New York City and Los Angeles, Leis moved to New Mexico in 1982 and later earned her MFA from the University of New Mexico. She has since participated in more than 20 artist residencies in the United States and abroad. One of the most consequential came at Crater Lake in Oregon in 2001. 

“I woke up every morning, and I felt like I was falling into this incredible blue abyss,” Leis said. “You can feel like you’re swallowed up by it. But it was a wonderful feeling, a soothing feeling.” 

Her work became increasingly reductive during that period, concentrating less on objects and more on space, atmosphere and color. Blue dominated for several years before another residency pulled her toward a different palette. 

“I started feeling, ‘Ah, I need more grounding,’” Leis said. “And so, I went to a residency in North Thailand, which is totally green.” 

Travel continued to reshape the way Leis understood color. A summer residency in northern Finland exposed her to nearly continuous daylight. Later, she sought the opposite experience during a winter residency in Iceland. 

The darkness initially felt unfamiliar. Eventually, it became something else. 

“Darkness can feel like velvet,” Leis said. “It can feel very soothing. It can feel very normal.” 

Those experiences help explain the structure Sage chose for “Breathing Lessons.” Rather than arranging two decades of work chronologically, the exhibition moves through color — from white into gray and black, through blue and eventually toward brighter reds and yellows. 

Place remains a connecting thread, particularly New Mexico, where Leis has lived for more than four decades. Nature appears repeatedly as well. Trees have become subjects across paintings, sculptures, and videos, allowing Leis to approach the same idea through different forms. 

“I want to give people that experience of how incredible and precious their trees are,” Leis said. 

Behind the minimalism of much of Leis’ work is another concern: speed. 

She remembers when the business surrounding an artistic career moved through letters and traditional mail. Technology changed that rhythm, creating an expectation of immediate responses, and leaving less time for the studio. 

For Leis, slowing down became deliberate. 

That philosophy sits at the center of the retrospective. Leis does not want visitors to rush through the galleries looking for something to decipher. She wants them to spend enough time with the work for something less analytical to happen. 

“Maybe they walk out feeling something rather than intellectually thinking about something,” Leis said. “We’re not analyzing it. We’re just letting ourselves have that experience and just digesting it.” 

The exhibition will also extend beyond Leis’ own work. An accompanying show in the Mullennix Bridge Gallery will feature New Mexico artists she has mentored, reflecting a relationship Leis described as a give-and-take between artists at different stages of their careers. 

At 88, after a creative life that has moved from dance to acting, across countries and through countless shades, Leis still has difficulty choosing a single color. 

But in New Mexico, one keeps returning. 

“I would have to say blue, because that’s what we are confronted with so many of our days,” Leis said. “The sky is just an essential part of our everyday life.”