With all the foot traffic in Small World Coffee each day comes just as many varieties of interests, heritages and walks of life. So when Small World owner Jessica Durrie decided to plan the third annual Love Show in the café in February, it makes sense that the artwork would be just as varied.

The Love Show features works of art—which all fit with the theme of love—by more than 40 local artists as part of a community fundraiser to support the Northeast Organic Farmers Association. An opening night party Feb. 10 will celebrate art in its visual, musical and culinary forms and kick off the month-long show.

While guests at the party dance to the music of Motorfunker DJs from WPRB and DJ AGGReshen or enjoy food from Olives and the Bent Spoon, they can also peruse the art display, which was curated by Suzanne Cunningham and Jacqui Alexander.

Guests can stop to take another look at a brightly colored image of spring flowers blurred to skew its viewers’ sense of vision, or ponder the meaning of a photo of two pigs’ bottoms as they sleep together outside. Most artists will feature only one work, some two, but all have something different to contribute.

There are submissions from people like Natalie Hamill, whose family owns Cherry Grove Farm in Lawrence. She doesn’t really consider herself an artist even though she used to dabble in watercolor painting, saying she doesn’t have the time to continue the art after spending her days at the farm. Instead, she and fellow farm worker Stacey Gentile took photos of the animals around the farm to submit; the cute, cuddling pigs made the cut.

Hamill, a Lawrence resident, also sits on the board of NOFA, and said the donations from the show will help support NOFA’s beginning farmers program, which assists young farmers in getting experience and access to land.

“Even though there is a fair amount of land left that’s preserved for farmland, it’s just, it’s hard because we don’t really have the farming community that we used to have in places,” Hamill said. “Like Lancaster, Pennsylvania has a really good driving farming community. In New Jersey, we’re trying to bring that back with small organic farmers.”

She wanted her photos to showcase the farm, but also show the love she and the other farm workers have for the animals and the products they make at the farm. If the photo sells at the show, Hamill plans to donate the proceeds to NOFA.

For professional photographer Robin Resch, many of the pieces she completes are meaningful self-portraits, though she doesn’t actually appear in the work.

“I see them as really personal sort of expressions,” Resch said. “They’re almost like self-portraits in a sense, because when I’m making these pieces, they tend to come from really emotional sort of places when I make them, so they’re portraits of moments when I’m feeling.”

The Princeton resident submitted a blurred photo of three flowers in her garden, but which shows a “composition of color and light and dark.”
“For me, this picture is very much about a beautiful time and place, as a flower would be in a garden,” Resch said, “but to be part of this process of sort of blurring the focus is for me, it’s a way of sort of changing our vision just enough to look at it a little bit differently.”
Princeton resident Elina Lorenz is constantly changing the media she works with, but said she loves to make abstract works and use bright colors as much as she can. She’s worked with media such as oil, acrylic and watercolor, as well as a new media called encaustic painting, which uses hot beeswax infused with pigment that hardens as it cools.
“I have an idea in my mind. I start with something realistic. I take a still life and I just break it into pieces,” Lorenz said. “And it’s still there, but at the same time it’s broken down into different geometric shapes.”
Her Love Show submission is three hearts painted with watercolor and ink in shades of pink and incorporated different graphics.
Unlike Lorenz’s abstract work, other pieces featured in the show depict very literal scenes.
Many Lawrence residents have driven by Willis Greenhouse on Route 206 without taking a second glance, but photographer Jennifer Cabral captured an image of the longstanding business in a new light. The black and white photo set to be displayed at Small World is actually a still photo Cabral took last February, when the the word “LOVE” was taped in sheets of paper on the greenhouse windows.
Most of her work documents a moment of seemingly commonplace people and places.
“I try to capture what is really around me without much interference,” Cabral, of Lawrence, said. “It’s really documenting what is around, if it’s down my street, or different places that I have been or something I know that I pass every day, I try to still look at it and register it as what I perceive.”
Of course, some artists chose not to reveal too much about what onlookers might see at the show. One of those artists was Princeton resident Corrine O’Hara, who works as a sexual health educator at HiTops.
About 10 years ago, O’Hara started to re-explore her love for the arts, and after attending a workshop in New York, regularly stayed in contact with some of the other participants by working together to create an altered book. Each member would have a turn to add something different to the book before mailing it to the next person.
It was then that O’Hara discovered her love for creating altered books, which can be cut, painted, sewed or have any kind of materials or decorations added to it to completely redesign the book. O’Hara’s Love Show submission is an altered book designed with the show in mind, and is a reinvention of an old children’s book.
“It was more just the shape of the book that spoke to me. It was just kind of the right size, the right width,” O’Hara said.
These pieces of art and more will be on display beginning Feb. 7 at Small World Coffee, located at 14 Witherspoon St. in Princeton. Those who attend the benefit may bring a donation of any amount or purchase a Love Show t-shirt at the shop throughout the month.
For Durrie, the benefit shows just how much one person’s contribution can help a cause.
“A lot of small gifts can really make an impact, and it’s very similar to our business,” Durrie said. “I mean, our average transaction is $5 at a time ... I like the idea of seeing if we can have a fundraising event that just a lot of small, genuine good gestures add up to something really great.”
On Feb. 10, party-goers are invited to “dress to impress” and enjoy the music of DJ AGGReshen and WPRB’s Motorfunker DJs. The party is scheduled for 8-11 p.m.
“If all you can bring is your good energy, then please come and bring your good energy,” Durrie said. “But if you can throw in 20 bucks, then thank you.”