Main Projects is pleased to present New Flesh, a two-person exhibition featuring new and recent work by Tori Mitchell and Amelia Baxter. Both artists received their MFAs from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2026, and the exhibition offers a focused look at two distinct practices emerging from one of Richmond’s most rigorous artistic communities.
Bringing together Mitchell’s oil paintings and Baxter’s ceramic sculptures, New Flesh considers how inherited images, histories, and forms can be remade from the inside out. Mitchell works from the visual language of the past to construct a lesbian pseudo-history, inserting queer presence into cultural narratives where it has been erased, obscured, or assumed absent. Baxter builds large-scale ceramic organisms whose patterned surfaces and bodily forms suggest creatures, organs, relics, and selves in states of becoming. In each artist’s work, the past is not fixed. It is porous, fleshy, unstable, and available for transformation.
Mitchell’s paintings operate as invented artifacts. Works such as Wilderwoman and Child, Unicorn Tapestry II, and After Phyllis and Aristotle draw from religious iconography, medieval romance, illuminated manuscripts, and mythological subjects, but their logic has been deliberately redirected. In her thesis, Mitchell describes her project as a counter-history in which “every figure is a lesbian until proven otherwise,” using painting to challenge the heteronormative assumptions that shape how the past is read. Her surfaces often appear aged, weathered, darkened, or partially obscured, mimicking the visual language of historical objects while complicating the authority of the histories they seem to inherit. In Executioner, Mitchell draws from the late medieval painting The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist by the Master of Palanquinos, preserving the architecture of the original scene while shifting its emotional and symbolic charge. Through this act of reimagining, a familiar biblical episode becomes a site for Mitchell’s broader inquiry into power, witness, gender, and the histories that images carry forward.
If Mitchell’s paintings reclaim the archive, Baxter’s sculptures seem to emerge from a pre-verbal, bodily world. In this body of work, Baxter treats clay as both structure and skin. Her practice centers on coil-built ceramic sculpture, often using pigmented clay so that color is not merely applied to the surface, but built into the body of the object itself. The resulting forms feel singular and self-contained, yet intensely vulnerable: bodies with openings, pressure points, folds, protrusions, and patterned skins that carry the history of their making. In the oversized ceramic sculpture Sugar for the Slugs, Baxter transforms the humble slug into a strange, bodily monument, using scale, pattern, and surface to turn something small and vulnerable into a form that feels seductive, comic, and unsettling.
For Baxter, making is a form of thinking. Her thesis, A Mutant Perfect, describes ceramic figures as carriers of embodied knowledge, asking what forms emerge when sculpture is allowed to develop through rhythm, pressure, contact, and material response rather than through a predetermined image. Her works invite recognition before interpretation: a bodily understanding of surface, weight, tenderness, humor, absurdity, and need.
Seen together, Mitchell and Baxter share an interest in the figure as a site of revision. Mitchell looks backward, finding ways to reimagine the subjects who were excluded from historical record. Baxter looks inward, toward the body’s own strange intelligence and the forms that arise when sensation becomes structure. Both artists use distortion not as a departure from truth, but as a way of getting closer to it.
New Flesh also marks a continued conversation between Main Projects and the artists, writers, and makers shaping Richmond’s contemporary art landscape. Rather than treating the city as a backdrop, the exhibition situates Richmond as an active site of artistic production: a place where rigorous, materially ambitious, and intellectually alive practices are taking form now.
Together, Mitchell and Baxter offer a world of saints, slugs, unicorns, vessels, membranes, lovers, monsters, relics, and bodies that refuse to stay in their assigned categories. Their works ask what happens when history is not simply inherited, but re-bodied.
Tori Mitchell is a Richmond, Virginia-based visual artist born in Mesa, Arizona. She received her BFA in Painting from Arizona State University in 2018 and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Painting and Printmaking in 2026. Influenced by lesbian and queer culture, medieval art, religious imagery, myth, and folklore, Mitchell reimagines art history through a lesbian gaze, constructing an alternative historical world defined by queer presence.
Amelia Baxter is an artist based in Richmond, Virginia. She received her MFA in Craft + Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2026 and her BA from the School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. Working across sculpture, ceramics, painting, and drawing, Baxter’s current practice centers on large-scale ceramic sculpture, building pattern into form through coil construction with pigmented clays. She begins a Post-Master’s Teaching Fellowship at VCUarts in 2026.