New galleries have a long history of bringing back bygone buildings where rents were once less expensive. SoHo, in lower Manhattan, is the one example spoken of most often that exemplifies the turnaround from scary streets to cutting edge culture. I remember all the loft parties and gallery openings I attended throughout the 1970s, as well as the feeling of being in a place related in part to the Dada movement of the 1910s in Zurich or the 1950s era Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. Of course, those earlier examples and locations were markedly different from SoHo of the 1970s, especially due to the impact of two World Wars in the first half of the twentieth century. However, the zeitgeist, or the spirit of the times, had many commonalities. A spark of that past can be found today at Hygienic Art gallery in New London, Connecticut, albeit on a much smaller scale. Hygienic Art began with the transformation of a well-known but long neglected inner-city diner. It was reborn as a challenging exhibition space where the effect on the local culture ranges well beyond its walls.

        The physical renovation at Hygienic Art left quite a bit of the history of the original eatery—the old, tiled flooring; a long, worn Formica counter, complete with swiveling stainless steel stools; and remnants of a working short order kitchen remain intact. There’s no mistaking it; this was once a diner.

        Today, it stands as an edgy exhibition space consisting of four rooms. The entrance contains the repurposed kitchen and counter area with portions of an opposing wall available to install art. A larger space around the corner consists of two clearly connected flow-through rooms that offer ample space for wall works and sculptures where there once were tables and booths. A lower level down a flight of stairs has been completely renovated and turned into an open space for installation and wall art.

        The nine artists featured in “The Unusual Suspects: Art from Unexpected Materials” are Kamal Ahmad, Howard el-Yasin, Carol Flaitz, Carla Goldberg, Eric Grau, Deborah Hesse, Alison McNulty, Suzan Shutan and Brian Walters. The exhibition’s theme, which maintains the idea of the found, unconventional, repurposed object as a primary medium is well covered by the curator, and exhibiting artist, Carla Goldberg.

        Starting in the entrance room are a number of works by Carol Flaitz. Working primarily with encaustic on charred wood, Flaitz creates reflective earthscapes featuring intensified colors in fluid transitions. The two larger works are more dimensional than the small ones, as the artist is able to set a layer of blackened wood and cosmic color slightly above a dark background textured with crystalline salts and ground glass. This separation of bright color edged in burnt wood above an elaborate blackness suggests the ever-shifting plates of the earth that sometimes cause earthquakes and tsunamis. This darker read makes the colorful upper layer more about chemical spills and ground or water pollution rather than a wondrous and wild world.

        In the second room are works by Suzan Shutan and Howard El-Yasin. Shutan utilizes craft store materials such as plastic straws, colorful fuzzy string, and tiny pom poms to bridge the gap between drawing, sculpture, and architecture. Shutan’s most striking work is Detrimental Sips (2000-25), a wall mounted construction in a triangle-based geometric pattern that looks like a “funky town” train trestle crafted with bent plastic straws and a tar-like glue. Judging by the title, Shutan is making a statement about the dangers of plastic straws on marine life, while the structure itself suggests a potential bridge across a worrisome waterway. This combination of references clearly highlights a separation of realities and pinpoints a lack of understanding or responsibility since almost every man-made structure in some or many ways negatively affects the environment.

        Furthering the realm of political art are the works by Howard El-Yasin. Using baked banana peels to create Bananas, Bananas, Bananas (2018–19), El-Yasin focuses attention on the hidden atrocities of the burgeoning banana business. During the earliest days of production, the1928 Banana Massacre in Santa Maria, Columbia took place, wiping out as many as 2,000 innocent people. Overworked Brillo, which is a patchwork of squarish steel wool scrubbing pads, indirectly mocks Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes (1964) and puts the emphasis on the drudgery of the woesome kitchen worker. Both works are about power inequities that seems to be getting worse by the hour.

        Dominating the third space are the surreal sculptures of Erik Grau. Using concrete and natural and synthetic materials, Grau offers multi-level, fantastical landscapes that feature a fairy tale surface area with caves and transitional spaces below. The pure magic of it all punctuated by the presence of numerous mushrooms prompts visitors to open up, breathe, and wonder.

        Sharing the space with Grau are works by three artists: Deborah Hesse, who constructs “spatial wall paintings” that float off the wall suggesting a multiverse of earthly locations; Brian Walters who weaves strips of rusted painted metal to create post-apocalyptic baskets; and last but not least, Carla Goldberg, who offers the eerily epic Eulogies (2022), made from the resurrected materials that once encircled the Jacob Javits Center on New York City’s West Side during the worst days of COVID. Hanging now a few inches from the gallery wall, Eulogies’s reshaped, recovered Plexiglas covered with scratched black pigment suggests the darkest days of the pandemic when New York City was totally unnerved and in full lock-down mode.

        In the lower level are the works of two artists, Kamal Ahmad and Alison McNulty. Ahmad clearly reaches his lofty goal of creating an installation that speaks of “loss, survival, and resilience.” Using primarily covered and rolled-up foam mattresses and prayer rugs, Ahmad projects the overbearing weight of being a refugee in a world full of unwanted wars and displacement. Scale, juxtaposing numbers, and the ensuing disorientation all add up to an extremely impressive installation.

        Alison McNulty matches Ahmad’s powerful presentation with an equally quiet array of small works in the Domestic Fault series. In this series, a number of cautiously peeled away and seemingly impossibly stitched together fragile layers of exterior house paint projects both hope and hopelessness at a time when many of us are exposed to maddening realities.

        At difficult times like this, it is important to look towards the arts. Places like the Hygienic Art gallery, a bright cultural light in a city in transition, offers a space to contemplate a better, more sensitive, sensible, and inventive world.  

D. Dominick Lombardi is a visual artist, art writer, and curator. Currently, Lombardi is curating and participating in three group exhibitions. The first, “You Think That’s Funny, Humor in Contemporary Art” will run from August 2 to November 16 at the Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden. The next two exhibitions both titled “Fingindo ou Fingimento (Pretending)” will be in Portugal. The first will open at Braço Perna 44 in Lisbon on October 30 and run through November 29. The second will be held at Atelier Ghostbirds in Caldas da Rainha, opening on November 8 and closing in January of 2026.