For more than 15 years, Laura Martin Mills has been working to make collecting art more accessible through her company, Exhibition A. With a burgeoning online business, she saw no need for a gallery.

“I always said that I would never have a physical space,” says Martin Mills. “I had this online world I was living in, getting to collaborate with artists all over the world.” With international customers making up a third of her client base, a brick-and-mortar location wasn’t a priority.

But after 10 years managing her New York-based business remotely from Richmond, Martin Mills started to dig into the local art scene and was surprised at what she found. “I started to understand the amazing things happening here,” she says. “I thought that there was a real opportunity to bring a different voice to the city and facilitate more conversation around collecting.”

She already had her eyes on the former Page Bond Gallery space on Main Street. Then she ran into Eric Thomas-Suwall, who had just recently moved to Richmond from North Dakota. Thomas-Suwall and his husband, Rob, make up the duo known as The Icy Gays who have become media darlings in the art collecting world.

“We work with a lot of the same artists and I think we have a similar philosophy about collecting,” says Martin Mills. “I told him I was opening this project space and he said he was thinking of opening a gallery and I said, ‘Well, we should sit down sometime.’”

The result of their collaboration is the new Main Projects gallery that premiered its first exhibitions last week, a seasonally appropriate pair called “Lovers” and “Friends.”

For “Lovers,” Martin Mills and her co-curator Elizabeth Dolan Wright took inspiration from the iconic “Virginia is for Lovers” slogan. By featuring work by acclaimed artists with Virginia connections, the exhibition explores “the intersection of love and Virginia as a Venn diagram between the multiplicity of meanings in each” according to the show’s introductory display.

The associated “Friends” show includes smaller works that invite close viewing and showcases connections between artists and their individual practices.

Martin Mills has highlighted accessibility wherever possible at the gallery, for instance, including a “Cliff Notes” section on the price sheet for the “Lovers” show that provides museum-style capsule comments for most of the works.

“Elizabeth, who organized this exhibition with me, was like, ‘I’ve never seen that done,’” says Martin Mills. “But I feel like I can break the rules here. I want to be transparent about pricing, and I also really want people to read about the art and learn about the artist.”

The notes reflect that the majority of the exhibition’s artists received degrees from either Virginia Commonwealth University or University of Virginia. “We want this to be a community-oriented space,” explains Martin Mills.

Her success in attracting major talent is evident in the inclusion of an artist like Loie Hollowell, who earned her MFA degree at VCU and has gone on to have major solo shows at Pace Galleries around the world. In a press release announcing “Lovers,” Hollowell says, “It’s exciting to see a gallery like Main Projects create another space for supporting artists locally, while fostering connections with the broader art world.”

Martin Mills’ company, Exhibition A, works with artists to create limited editions or prints that are less expensive than their major works. The company will have an outpost in the Main Projects gallery, occupying a small library-like nook in the space.

“It gives us a place where we can introduce people to really amazing artists at a more accessible price point,” says Martin Mills. “I want to generate more conversation around prints and editions, which is seen as a very legitimate practice in the fine art world.”

Martin Mills says she and Thomas-Suwall hope to turn more casual patrons into collectors. She developed a collector’s guide to accompany the “Lovers” and “Friends” exhibitions to help educate newcomers to the gallery.

“I want patrons to be equipped with knowledge about how one would collect in a space so that they’re not intimidated to talk to any of us about it,” she says. “If someone has $100 to spend or $100,000, I’m still excited to have a conversation with them.”

The exhibitions “Lovers” and “Friends” are on exhibition at Main Projects, 1625 West Main St. through April 4. More information and additional images available at https://mainprojects.co/.