Image: Racine Art Museum
Racine Art Museum will open 'Michael Velliquette: Intuitive Patterns' on July 22, 2026, presenting a year-long installation in the museum’s Windows on Fifth Gallery. The exhibition is scheduled to run through July 11, 2027, and the museum says the arrangement of works will change midway through the run.
According to RAM’s exhibition materials, Wisconsin-based Velliquette has created an installation that reflects his interest in color theory, pattern-making, and papercraft. The work builds on his long-term relationship with paper, including his study of its history and physical capabilities, but here that knowledge is transferred to lightweight, durable Tyvek panels that he has hand-cut into intricate designs.
The exhibition text places papercutting at the center of the project’s visual and conceptual structure. Each panel is described as hand-cut with geometric motifs, intuitive abstraction, hex-protection symbols, and visual references to portals and windows. Velliquette frames the tradition as both a technical foundation and a cultural lineage, noting on the exhibition page that papercutting is over 2,500 years old and is still practiced in cultures worldwide. In the museum’s description, Tyvek serves as “a contemporary stand-in to actual fiber-based paper” because of its durability, integrity and tensile strength.
RAM’s presentation also points to the artist’s broader practice. The museum describes Velliquette, born in 1971, as working with cut paper to make books, two-dimensional reliefs and three-dimensional sculpture. It says he explores color as a spiritual and metaphorical tool while also working through pattern and design. In more recent work, the museum notes, he has foregrounded labor, process and materiality, allowing works to accrue “cut-by-cut and piece-by-piece” in a process he calls “slow-motion improvisation.”
The exhibition is being presented at Windows on Fifth Gallery at Racine Art Museum, extending the institution’s focus on paper-based work and related material practices. RAM’s collection also includes five works by Velliquette, underscoring an existing relationship between the artist and the museum. The exhibition materials credit installation-view photography to Rachel Comande and identify the artist as a Madison-based assistant professor of Foundations in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The museum’s newsletter preview says the intensely saturated panels will be shown in arrangements that change partway through the exhibition’s 12-month span, giving visitors a reason to return as the presentation shifts over time. 'Michael Velliquette: Intuitive Patterns' opens Wednesday, July 22, 2026, at Windows on Fifth Gallery at Racine Art Museum and continues through July 11, 2027.
