gern en regalia

Mind your head. Down a steep flight of stairs, you’ll arrive in what feels like an underground oasis. Gern en Regalia is a clean and spare subterranean space that softly hums, worlds away from the clamoring street above.

The artists here are tattoo artists who paint, clothing designers who make art, poets who think in images, and musicians who turn emotion into noise. That restless, anything-goes spirit runs through the program.

The exhibitions can be strange, tender, and a little otherworldly. Talismans, spirits, and symbols come drifting out the longer you look. Something that first reads as a playful little figure might start to resemble a charm or a tiny map of another world. Handmade, intimate, but crucially, never precious.

The gallery doesn’t represent artists in the conventional way, but often returns to them. Following the gallery means following how a community marching to the beat of its own rules develops over time.

Gern en Regalia was founded by musician Mario Miron (of Liturgy) and poet and WFMU broadcaster Zoe Brezsny. The project began in 2017 in a residential basement in Maspeth, then moved during the pandemic into the back room of Aeon Books, the esoteric bookstore on East Broadway, before finding its current Henry Street home.

The name is its own little hybrid: “gern,” inspired by a friend’s use of “gurn” for going out to a techno club and also connected to the German gerne, meaning gladly or with pleasure, meets Frank Zappa’s instrumental Peaches en Regalia. It doesn’t quite make sense, which is rather the point.