2101 WINTER ST | HTX 77007 | STE C105
This residency reimagines the Fresh Arts gallery as an instrument, intentionally activated through performance, visual art, and community gathering to reveal how displacement, migration, and belonging are not just stories we tell about space, but stories that create space. By showcasing the artists whose work brings Shout! and Our Road Home to life - painters, digital artists, writers, filmmakers, dancers - we transform the gallery into a living, resonant chamber where audiences can witness both the art and its making.
EVENTS
GALLERY AS INSTRUMENT OPENING RECEPTION
Be among the first to step inside Our Road Home: Gallery as Instrument, an immersive gallery experience rooted in rhythm, memory, and the art of homemaking. Join us for an opening reception featuring music, food, drinks, and an evening full of unexpected moments, plus an introduction to the artists whose work will animate this space over the next eight weeks.
DEMI NAVARRO-SHIH
This installation transforms the gallery into a resonant space where memory, voice, and imagination converge. At its center, a fabric structure recalls the instinct to build spaces of comfort and belonging, while projected fragments of domestic life drift across the surrounding walls. Inside, home videos and personal reflections gather, forming a shared archive of what “home” can mean.
As visitors move through the space, they activate layers of sound and image, encountering home not as a fixed place, but as something constructed through memory, experience, and connection. In dialogue with Our Road Home, the work asks where the feeling of home begins—and how it continues to live within us.GALLERY OPEN HOURS:
Tuesdays 12-8pm
Saturdays 12-5pm
ARTIST TALK WITH DEMI NAVARRO-SHIH
As a documentary filmmaker and visual storyteller, Demi contributed original content and animations that live inside the production itself, weaving film and motion graphics into the fabric of the performance. Join us for an intimate conversation with Demi whose work exists at the intersection of documentation and creation, capturing the journey of Our Road Home while simultaneously shaping it. She'll talk about the process, the creative contributions, and what it means to tell a story that is still unfolding in real time. Come with your questions and your curiosity. The conversation will be real, the room will be warm, and the work will move you.
JEROME BAILEY, JR
As part of Gallery as Instrument, featuring artists from Our Road Home, Jerome Bailey Jr. presents Mortar.
The exhibition grows out of Emancipation, Bailey’s 48-foot handwritten poem and live performance created for Our Road Home and rooted in the history of Freedmen’s Town, where formerly enslaved people began building homes and laying brick streets by hand after news of freedom reached Texas in 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Many had spent their lives harvesting cotton. They used the labor they knew to build something of their own. What had been extracted from them became foundation.
In Mortar, Bailey carries that history forward through muslin cotton, torn paper, and reworked surfaces that hold labor, damage, delay, and repair. Cotton once tied to bondage becomes a place to write. Paper, so often tied to record, decree, and delayed announcement, is cut, layered, torn back, and worked over. The marks stay visible.
The title points to what holds things together. Brick may bear the weight, but mortar binds it, keeps it standing, and makes a structure out of separate pieces. Bailey uses that idea to think through history, faith, survival, and the work of holding a life together under pressure.
Using the gallery as instrument, Bailey brings together his full language of making: handwritten poetry, visual construction, and performance. Mortar continues the line from Emancipation and deepens it, moving from the brick streets of Freedmen’s Town to the emotional, spiritual, and domestic labor of building something that lasts.MORTAR Exhibition Opening
MORTAR, a new exhibition by Jerome Bailey Jr. presented as Bailey’s featured contribution to Our Road Home: Gallery as Instrument. MORTAR grows out of Emancipation, the live performance work first presented as part of the Our Road Home stage production at the Hobby Center for the Performaing Arts, and expands that vision into a new body of work shaped by Bailey’s distinctive use of language as medium.
MORTAR will be on view through May 10. The April 30 opening celebration will feature light refreshments and a live presentation by Bailey.
HOME SCHOOL: FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT DANCE WORKSHOP
Class is in session and the classroom is the dance floor. Home School is a series of learning modules connected to Our Road Home: Gallery as Instrument, and Freedom of Movement is where the body does the teaching. Led by choreographer and director Jakari Sherman alongside cast members of Our Road Home, this workshop introduces participants to the dance forms at the heart of the production - stepping, percussive movement, and the physical vocabulary of freedom. No experience necessary, no wrong moves, no sidelines. Whether you've never danced a day in your life or movement is already your language, this workshop meets you where you are and takes you somewhere new. Come ready to move, sweat a little, and leave with something in your body that wasn't there before. Stay for the artist talk that follows, where the conversation continues and goes even deeper.
ARTIST TALK WITH JEROME BAILEY, JR
Jerome Bailey, Jr. has painted the world that Our Road Home lives inside, and now he's here to talk about it. Join us for a conversation with the visual artist and scenic designer behind the expansive backdrop and mixed-media works on view in the gallery. Jerome will walk us through his process, his influences, and what it means to create visual art in service of a story about freedom, place, and belonging. This is an open, informal dialogue - less lecture, more living room - and everyone is welcome to pull up a seat and ask the questions they've been holding since they first walked through the door.
HOME SCHOOL: With These Words Poetry Workshop
An interactive poetry workshop with Jerome Bailey, Jr. exploring language as resistance through guided prompts. Join us!
For Bailey, language is a form of resistance. It is how people survive, reach one another, and make meaning when the world gives them limited terms. As an award-winning journalist, Bailey has spent years entering people’s homes, listening across difference, and finding the common ground needed to tell a story truthfully. That experience now lives at the center of his art.
In Bailey’s practice, language is not simply written and painting is not simply visual. He does both at once. He composes with words and with image, using poetry, surface, rhythm, and design to make meaning land with force. “WITH THESE WORDS” explores vernacular, linguistics, and personal speech as forces that shape how we are understood and how we communicate across different lives and lived experience.Through guided prompts and conversation, participants will be invited to think more deeply about the language they already carry and how to use it with greater clarity and power.
Sounds Like Home
Strip away the staging, the lights, and the spectacle and what's left is the music. Sounds Like Home is a deconstructed, intimate concert experience drawn from the score of Our Road Home. Think Tiny Desk. Think Unplugged. Think a room full of people leaning in close while songs are performed one at a time, followed by a moment of conversation about where it came from, what it carries, and what it means. The music of Our Road Home moves through stepping rhythms, southern soul, spoken word, and sacred sound, and in this setting, every note lands differently. This is the show behind the show, the heartbeat of the production made audible in the most intimate way possible.
EDITH & LINDSAY QUINTANILLA
Pieces of Home is a multidisciplinary group of work in larger conversation with Our Road Home. The collaborative group of work explores freedom not only through a historical reality, but as an intimate and deeply personal connection to God. Where Freedman’s Town is a testament to rebuilding home in the wake of emancipation, this collection asks what it means to create home in oneself?
Through a collection of acrylic and digital paintings, mixed-media artist Edith, introduces feminine bodies as sites of vulnerability and strength. The figures are adorned with fragments of scripture that speak to identity, self-esteem, and love. Some are immediately visible, others more subtle, mirroring the ongoing process of recognizing one’s value through God’s identity. Each piece reflects an intimate journey toward embracing the fullness of being a daughter in Christ, where freedom is received.
Alongside these visual works, a series of written pieces offers a parallel narrative. Fiction writer Lindsay showcases stories rooted in sisterhood, family bonds, and the unlearning of generational trauma. The writing traces the path toward healing.
Together, these works form a dialogue of body, word, and lived experience. They ask: What does it mean to be free not just outwardly, but within? And how do love, faith, and lineage shape our home internally and externally. This exhibition is an invitation to witness and experience that ongoing pilgrimage rooted in grace.
GALLERY OPENING HOURS
Tuesdays 12-8pm
Saturdays 12-5pm
HOME SCHOOL: FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT DANCE WORKSHOP
Class is in session and the classroom is the dance floor. Home School is a series of learning modules connected to Our Road Home: Gallery as Instrument, and Freedom of Movement is where the body does the teaching. Led by choreographer and director Jakari Sherman alongside cast members of Our Road Home, this workshop introduces participants to the dance forms at the heart of the production - stepping, percussive movement, and the physical vocabulary of freedom. No experience necessary, no wrong moves, no sidelines. Whether you've never danced a day in your life or movement is already your language, this workshop meets you where you are and takes you somewhere new. Come ready to move, sweat a little, and leave with something in your body that wasn't there before. Stay for the artist talk that follows, where the conversation continues and goes even deeper.
ARTIST TALK WITH EDITH AND LINDSAY
Some of the most profound creative partnerships begin at home. Digital projection artist Edith Quintanilla joins her sister, creative writer Lindsay Quintanilla, for an evening that celebrates both their individual artistry and the familial bond that shapes and sustains it. Edith will share her process of building the immersive visual worlds of Our Road Home, while Lindsay brings her own literary voice into conversation alongside her sister's work - a living example of how home and family become the foundation from which art grows. This is a warm, candid celebration of two artists, one family, and the kind of creative legacy that only flourishes when it is rooted in love.
HOME SCHOOL: WRITING WORKSHOP
Generative Writing Workshop through ArtifactsOftentimes, when I start a new project, I find myself staring at a blank page and somehow my brain also feels blank. Staring at a blank page can feel daunting, especially if you are like me — an overthinker. Inspiration is all around us; we just have to jump in and use it. In this workshop, we'll work with various artifacts such as postcards, photographs, letters, headlines, and even objects. We’ll use these items as a springboard for generating new work. You’ll need a notebook and pens, a laptop, or anything you use for writing.
SHOUT! Freedom & Foodways
Live performance meets food and storytelling in Shout! - a blend of Gullah-Geechee, Texas and Louisiana culture, history, and community.
Pull up a chair and join the circle. Part performance, part communal gathering, part feast, Shout! Freedom and Foodways is an intimate, immersive experience that transforms the gallery into a living home. As the ring shout circle forms around you, the story of French Town, Gullah-Geechie culture, and the long journey of okra from Africa to the American South unfolds through stepping, live music, and spoken word. Between and alongside the performance, guests share in a tasting of the foods central to the Shout! story that carry memory, and resilience in every bite. This is not a show you watch from a distance. You are part of the circle, part of the community, part of the story. Come hungry - for food, for history, and for connection.
CLOSING RECEPTION
Eight weeks. Four rotating exhibitions. Intimate performances, movement workshops, community conversations, and a gallery that has been played like an instrument from the very first note. Now we gather to celebrate everything this residency has been and everyone who helped bring it to life. Join us for the closing reception of Our Road Home: Gallery as Instrument, an evening of music, drinks, and the deep warmth of a community that has built something entirely new together. This event is a threshold where everything that was tested, discovered, and made alive in these walls carries forward into the next, even bolder chapter of Our Road Home. Come celebrate what was built here, and step with us into the future.