Amos Eno Gallery, a non-profit, artist-run gallery, is pleased to present Making of an American Dandy, a solo exhibition and retrospective of artist James Horner, spanning more than 40 years of work. In a cultural moment shaped by renewed conversations about queer visibility, generational memory, and the politics of identity-making, Horner’s retrospective arrives with unmistakable urgency.
The exhibition will be on view from January 8 to February 8, 2026, with an opening reception on Friday, January 9, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the gallery at 191 Henry St. on New York’s Lower East Side. Works and installation images are also available to view via Artsy.
Horner will also host an artist talk on Sunday, Jan. 11 from 2 p.m. - 4 p.m. and a zine-making workshop on Saturday, January 31, from 2 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Horner’s work speaks directly to questions shaping American life today:
- What does it mean to come of age — and come into identity — as a queer person across decades of radical cultural change?
- How do we honor the stories of LGBTQ+ communities still fighting erasure?
- How do personal archives become political, historical, and profoundly communal?
At a moment when queer history is being rewritten, challenged, or legislated out of public view, Horner’s work positions the queer archive not as a static record but as a living, breathing practice — one rooted in resilience, humor, grief, eroticism, and radical tenderness.
Making of an American Dandy traces Horner’s life and artistic evolution through paintings, drawings, etchings, videos, photographs, sculptures, and zines. For Horner, the “Dandy” is not a costume or affectation, but a self-fashioned identity shaped by eccentric parents, queer elders, lovers, teachers, and an ever-expanding, intergenerational queer community. His influences — literature, nightlife, theater, travel, fashion, and activism — converge into a visual language that is both autobiographical and socially reflective.
As a gay man and survivor of the AIDS pandemic, Horner witnessed profound loss. Works such as Willy the Demigod and Last Night at Club Area memorialize vanished spaces and loved ones — not as nostalgia, but as acts of cultural preservation. In an era when queer history is often commodified or sanitized, Horner insists on complexity: joy beside grief, glamour beside devastation, beauty beside the grotesque.
Horner’s decades in corporate marketing and ongoing studies in art institutions across New York testify to his lifelong commitment to artistic exploration. His MFA from Lehman College in 2011 led to works examining the “grotesque physique,” including View from the Front Row, a playful yet incisive dialogue with fashion culture and the spectacle of desirability.
The exhibition also includes deeply personal works made after the 2021 suicide of his partner, Chris Hamilton. Pieces such as Sleepers offer a rare emotional clarity — intimate portraits of love, loss, and the aftermath of grief in queer life. Horner’s more recent works, including I Pledge Allegiance and Keith Haring — Pop Icon, link contemporary queer identity to its political lineage, honoring figures who shaped the cultural and activist landscape.
A “Wall of Decades” presents photographs, ephemera, and artworks tracing Horner’s creative and personal evolution. A limited-edition zine accompanies the show, with additional benefit prints and a T-shirt supporting Amos Eno Gallery’s fundraising efforts.
Running concurrently in The Project Space at Amos Eno is Queer Today – Love, Power, Freedom, featuring artists from Horner’s Magenta Lounge, a collective he founded in 2025 to uplift queer creatives and expand access to community-building platforms.
About the Artist
James Horner is a visual storyteller whose figurative works draw from queer culture, environmental psychology, and the emotional dynamics of social spaces. Influenced by his psychiatrist father, horror films, and the visual language of the queer underground, Horner’s characters inhabit worlds that are humorous, muscular, intimate, and destabilizing. His work has been exhibited at The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and The Bronx Museum, and he is a current participant in the Bronx River Art Center studio program. For more information, visit jameshornerart.com or on Instagram @jamesandthelovelies.
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