Recess Coffee promotes community activism, local art for customers
Hanging on the walls at Recess Coffee in Westcott are art installations by local artists. Customers can connect with the artists or purchase art pieces. Steven Wright | Contributing Photographer
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Hanging on the walls of Recess Coffee are displays of art, from hand-painted bags to clay food earrings. On a busy day, the line can snake out the door, but the art on the walls gives customers something to ponder while they wait.
“Once I was waiting in line, and there was a couple in front of me where one would go look at the art display and then come back, and then the other person would go,” Joe Flower, the shop’s location manager, said. “They ended up buying something.”
Currently, the Westcott location is one of two Recess coffee shops that showcase local artists by selling their work. By reaching out to Flower, who’s also the shop’s art coordinator, artists enter a contract to give their art a space for three months.
Artists’ displays reflect their work; some use a cork board with stickers pinned to them and others drape drawing clippings down yarn strands. With their contact and payment information nearby, customers can connect with the artists on social media or buy a piece.
Flower said her inbox always has at least a few artist inquiries, which is why they try to cycle through a variety of artists. However, some have standing contracts, like Margot Elizabeth, whose art has been at Recess for over four years.
Elizabeth started her art journey in 2017, custom painting shoes and jackets for family members around the holidays. That creativity returned when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, so she started making clay cookie earrings. Soon enough, people requested other foods.
“I guess sometime between then and now, it just kind of stuck,” Elizabeth said. “A lot of people recognize my handle as the girl that makes food earrings, which is pretty cool.”
Now, Recess is a constant spot where her art’s sold, but she also participates in many markets and festivals.
Elizabeth’s polymer clay earrings and stickers have always been popular; customers often come in to buy them when her restocks are posted on Instagram. Though she’s always looking for other shops to sell at, she’s comfortable with the fact that her audience is “niche.”
“I love when people see my work and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, that brings a smile to my face,’” Elizabeth said.
Recess can be a platform for artists with all kinds of journeys and missions. Marion Rodriguez, founder of MUVSU, her own art brand, has been an artist and activist for over 20 years.
Rodriguez is grateful for the spot she’s had in Recess for a year now; a former art coordinator reached out to her last year during Black History Month to highlight her art, and she’s kept the spot since.
Her hand-painted bags are gifted to women recently home from incarceration. As a formerly incarcerated woman herself, it helps her lift her voice and give back, she said.
Since 2020, she has sold over 4,000 bags. When a bag is finished, it’s given away with two personal notes: one from Rodriguez and one from members of the organization distributing the bags.
“It really is a tear-jerk moment for them to know that me, a random person, cares, and that I’m building a community of people who really do care about what they’re gonna do now in their future,” Rodriguez said.
Flower said that as an art consumer, she loves to see the pieces people submit to her, and being a resource for artists to gain a platform.
For Jon Matthews, a junior at SUNY ESF, art allows him to have a creative outlet outside of his work and studies. He started seriously pursuing art in 2023, when he was unhappy at his job. He drew so much on receipt paper that his boss would reassign him to other tasks.
Matthews reached out to Flower last August to see if he could sell stickers of his drawings, and he has done so ever since. Selling at Recess has strengthened his community ties, he said, but the payoff is not necessarily always monetary.
“It’s more just like, ‘Who else that I know is doing that? Let me do that,’” Matthews said. “It’s like getting an achievement in a video game, like my stickers are at a coffee shop.”
At ESF, Matthews studies wildlife science, and most of his stickers depict creatures or monsters he draws up. In class, he doodles on the side of his notes, then afterward, he takes a photo of his notes and uploads it to Procreate to make stickers.
In a small art community, it’s vital for artists to have one another’s backs, and hopefully, others will do the same, Matthews said. That’s what Recess aims to accomplish by highlighting local art.
“It can be really difficult for people to want to continue to do art if there’s not any sort of support from the community,” Flower said. “Even though that’s not always the point of doing art.”
