Gallery Exhibitions 2025-26
Big Bang Baby
Artist: Lusmerlin Lantigua
Reception: Thursday, February 5, 2026 5:30 PM
Gallery: The Rouse Company Foundation Gallery
Exhibition Dates: January 26, 2026 - March 16, 2026
Exhibition Information:
Big Bang Baby is an immersive celebration of joyful universes—where ancestral stories, scientific wonder, and spiritual imagination converge. Rooted in African and Caribbean Native cosmologies, the work reimagines creation through the figure of a female Zemi—a being of birth, transformation, and radiant energy. In Taíno culture, Zemis are both deities or ancestral spirits and the sculptural vessels that house them. They reveal themselves through vision and ritual, asking to be made from materials like bone, clay, wood, or stone.
Here, Big Bang Baby becomes a Zemi of joy, awe, and abundance—a cosmic spirit birthing new worlds through light and color. The installation pairs ancestral narratives with the physics of energy and matter, exploring how portals, dimensions, and the unseen forces of the universe mirror our inner states of being.
Visually, the work merges painting, sculpture, and light to form an environment that feels both earthly and celestial. Pastel, acrylic, LED lighting, wax paper, canvas, and sound come together in a constellation of translucent “clouds” that hover and glow—inviting visitors to move within the atmosphere of creation itself.
As an Afro-Latin immigrant artist, I see joy as an act of resistance—an energy field that expands beyond trauma to affirm collective imagination. Big Bang Baby offers a sanctuary for reflection and breathing, a space where myth meets science and where the universal becomes personal. It is an altar to possibility, honoring the power of ancestral memory and the boundless potential of light.
Artist Bio:
Bold like the streets of Santo Domingo, where she grew up, LUSMERLIN is a nationally exhibiting multidisciplinary artist, practicing in Greater Baltimore and Philadelphia. She has a professional background as a chemical engineer in textile and cement manufacturing. LUSMERLIN’s practice explores her own womanhood and identity: the presence of the body in space; the richness and baggage of her complex heritage -African, Arab, Spanish, Taino-; and her metamorphic immigration experience since moving to the U.S. in 2016. Her media include abstracted paintings, pastel, installations, photography and impromptu performances full of whim and force. LUSMERLIN is a 2024 Philadelphia Mural Arts Fellow, a 2025 Sondheim Prize semifinalist, and a grant recipient from the Baltimore Office for Promotion of the Arts, and the Frederick Arts Council. Her literary work has been published in multiple books and magazines in Puerto Rico, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. Beyond art, LUSMERLIN is deeply committed to community engagement, volunteering with organizations that support immigrants, disadvantaged groups, and arts advocacy.
Artist Statement:
I transform bodily movement and mental states into paintings, performances, and installations. My method is controlled chaos, often working directly with my hands, feet, or sticks. Large scale works in pastel or acrylic are most natural to me because they allow me to move, and to express immediate emotion through gesture and mark making. While I am painting, body movement is important for me to determine where the lines should travel, and how the color fields should be shaped.
The world fills me with awe, joy, and feelings of mysticism, which I transmit to my work. As a result, I tell stories that blend autobiography and dreams. Any moment of my life and my past can feel magical, and I share this through my work. I explore my experience as a woman, an immigrant, and human. My research includes travel and exposure to new environments, family and cultural storytelling, and also scientific concepts rooted in my engineering background. All these aspects come together to generate a multitude of possibilities and interpretations – just like in a dream.