DORF’s “Homeward Bound” Presents a Timely Portrait of Migration and Home

While they look wildly different for each of us, our individual concepts of home serve as one of the central ways by which we define ourselves. We are indelibly shaped by our cultures and communities. We love our homes and yet bemoan them – often in the same breath, if you’re from Texas. These initial touchpoints – both their physical structures and our emotional responses to them – also categorize our individual senses of safety. And it’s undeniable that many of our fellow Texans have had their senses of safety and home completely uprooted under the current political administration. 

“Homeward Bound,” now open at DORF and curated by Jesus Treviño, catalyzes the experience of shifting political tides, enforced by physical boundaries. The exhibition features artists Josue Bessiake, Esther Marie Hall, and Bárbara Miñarro, who all previously collaborated with Treviño at the Flower Shop artist residency, hosted through Frontera Arts in Bloom in Brownsville, Texas. “Homeward Bound” includes soft sculptures, mixed media, and various text- and fiber-based works that flank the gallery’s central piece, Bessiake’s Anatomy of a Home: Little Rooms. 

Composed of reclaimed wood and doors, Anatomy of a Home: Little Rooms offers audiences a bisected portrait of roughly hewn living quarters. Wood beams compose rudimentary walls, and despite the many doors that punctuate the framework, the work strikes a dichotomy inherent to “Homeward Bound” as a whole: that what is perceived as a home can also be a prison. 

In many of the show’s works, it’s not quite clear if you’re being kept safe or being kept captive. This suffocating duality is similarly expressed in Miñarro’s Me tienes atrapada, translated to You have me trapped, a soft sculpture that sits in DORF’s front window. In bright deadstock fabrics sourced from the border town of McAllen, Miñarro has the piece’s title mapped out in individual letters, propped up like inviting pillows. Without the understanding of Miñarro’s message, Me tienes atrapada feels inviting with its cheery color palette. In translating its title, however, the piece displays a mistrust of comfort. It reminds the audience that to relax is to remain vulnerable. 

An upright frame contains Esther Marie Hall’s heaven or something like it, a textile-based piece awash in dimensional pink fabric with inset silver and green stars zigging and zagging throughout. The individual panes of the piece create an obstructed, fractured view, keeping a  full glimpse of heaven slightly out of reach – and seemingly taking cues from the architecture of Texas’ border walls. Several of Hall’s works have this same severed window motif, and each continues the dialogue of escape and capture, exit and entrance. 

Both DORF and Treviño, individually and collaboratively, are very clear in their intentions for “Homeward Bound.” This is not an apolitical approach to immigration, and lays quite bare the dizzying and violent effects of America’s immigration policies. It also feels especially pertinent to observe the show’s run in such close proximity to “Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá” (“Not From Here, Not From There”) from artist Victor Quinoñez. The anti-ICE exhibition was abruptly closed by the University of North Texas in February with little explanation. 

In a quote from the curator, Treviño summarized: “Without realizing it, home is an extension of ourselves with systems that don’t quite work together but still somehow function.” That reflection seems like an evident parallel to the Constitution’s preamble, in which our nascent country was called to create a “more perfect Union.” Call it cynicism, but this has always seemed to be a passive acknowledgement of this country’s incredibly imperfect character and a call for us to strive for a better ideal. 

We are, at our best, an amalgam. As systems that function, while perhaps not quite fitting together initially. The United States was built on and is bettered by immigrants bringing their homes to our shores, and “Homeward Bound” illuminates that reality – and all its complexity – beautifully.

This article appears in April 3 • 2026.

A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands.

SUPPORT US