Mahwah Artist Helps Friends With Special Needs Showcase Artwork

MAHWAH, NJ — A Mahwah artist is helping people with special needs showcase their work at local charity auctions.

Suzanne Lippe has volunteered her local studio, supplies and skills to teens and adults with developmental disabilities, and helps some of those she mentors get their work appreciated at fundraising events, specifically those for the Friendship Circle of Suffern.

In fact, Lippe, just this month, coordinated a fundraising sale for Friendship at Rising Above Bakery in New York — the location of another sale organized last year by the nonprofit. The 2022 sale featured work from a Friendship painting contest in the town of Ramapo, where Suffern is incorporated.

Lippe, a professional illustrator, will continue her relationship with Friendship — which provides support to special needs children — by helping other nonprofit volunteers organize yet another fundraising auction in June. Friendship is a program of the Chabad Jewish Center of Suffern, of which the Mahwah artist is a member.

Her whole family has been familiar with the program for more than eight years, and she said that working with people with disabilities, helping them to make art and being involved with the community at large makes her very happy.

"Watching kids smile when they finish a painting they are pleased with, it's the best feeling..." Suzanne Lippe said, "knowing they took an idea in their imagination and turned it into something tangible to be shared with others."

Lippe's daughter Paige — a behavioral specialist in Cresskill — said she wonders if her mother's work is a way of continuing her late father's legacy of caring for others.

Suzanne's husband and Paige's father, Michael Lippe, died in a private plane crash in 2010; the family was very involved with Valley Chabad in Woodcliffe Lake before his death.

"Both my mother and father taught me that helping others is one of the most important things a person can do in life," Paige Lippe said. "She instilled values in me that no doubt shaped my interest in psychology and behavior analysis."

Suzanne Lippe's studio, located in her Mahwah carriage house, is open to youth and adults alike, regardless of ability. As an artist, her daughter said, Lippe finds any opportunity to create and to help others create.

"My mother deserves recognition," Paige Lippe said. "She's been through a lot but still brings joy into others' lives.