Hutzell: In ‘The Big Rip,’ an artist shares today’s immigrant experience

The vibrant colors of “The Big Rip” stretch across the gallery wall, a 28-foot-long explosion of figures and textures on a monumental scale.

A yellow cloud leaps outward from a woman’s silhouette on the right, stretching across blue beams of light to more figures on the left.

They are being ripped apart by external forces, their pink and magenta arms and hands grabbing, trying to hold on against tide and time.

“It is about this moment,” artist Lusmerlin Lantigua says. “It serves as a way for me to cope also, and it has, I think, that general sensation I have had, is that things are falling apart.”

We’re standing in the Rouse Company Foundation Gallery at Howard Community College to talk about her solo exhibit, “Big Bang Baby.” Her pitch brought me here.

“An immigrant made this 28-foot painting,” she emailed me last month.

The immigrant experience has changed in the last year. It’s always been about being the other. It’s a conflict between keeping your identity while fitting in, yet always being seen as someone from outside.

It’s never been easy. My grandfather got a “Dearest Fred” letter after he immigrated here in 1923, an admission from his fiancée that she just couldn’t leave her world behind and start over in the new.

Today, the national politics of immigration have turned unfriendly. Under President Donald Trump, a swollen army of armed, masked immigration agents is hunting immigrants, snatching them out of workplaces and off the street.

Some are here without permission, others are legal residents or even citizens.

Like any tumultuous moment, the political right’s anti-immigrant agenda will show up in the arts.

Listen to Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis,” or see Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime plea written on a spiked football, “Together, we are America.”

So I’ve been looking for it in local arts, places like the stages of Annapolis and the galleries of Columbia.

“You never know around any corner, who’s supporting, who isn’t,” says Lusmerlin, who goes by her first name as an artist, “who’s helpful and who actually holds good feelings towards you, and who suddenly believes and supports things personally about your friends and family and neighbors.”

Lusmerlin grew up in the Dominican Republic, a child of working parents. She was a standout student who loved math, physics and writing.

She earned a degree in chemical engineering, then went to work in textile manufacturing. When she moved to the United States in 2016 to get married, she had to figure out a new country, a new language and a new relationship.

“The only person you know is your spouse,” Lusmerlin says.

She found work in New Jersey cement plants, where she eventually rose to supervise several factories. She quickly realized, however, that other workers were watching her not only as a woman and a boss but also as an immigrant.

She discovered an outlet for that in performing and visual arts, something she didn’t get to explore as a child.

“I did not have, really, access to a lot of things to buy, paint and support. This is extremely expensive to put together,” Lusmerlin says.

She loved literature and poetry growing up, but didn’t have the money to make her own art.

“Books someone can hand you down. You can always write on paper. It’s a lot more accessible. I didn’t have money.”

Her engineering job allowed her to buy acrylics, pastels, canvas, paper and wood. Her colors come from the textiles she once helped make — bright yellows, deep blues and vivid reds that reflect the Afro-Dominican and Taíno spirituality of her home country.

“I have to make sure I hang on to parts of my culture and my heritage and my upbringing that are precious to me, that connect me internally and spiritually and keep me grounded,” Lusmerlin says.

All the works from “Big Bang Baby” were created in 2025 and ’26, incorporating her identity, her love of physics as a young student — “I’m a physics nerd” — and her experience as an immigrant woman.

Lusmerlin uses her body as a central element, black silhouettes and collages of purple and magenta that turn the way others see her into bridges that tie her ideas together.

“The Big Rip” hangs across the gallery from the exhibit’s namesake work, “Big Bang Baby.” It’s the moment of creation.

Together, they are the beginning and the end. “The Big Rip” is the instant of destruction, when the expanding universe reaches the point where it can no longer withstand endless tearing apart.

It’s a pretty good metaphor for what’s happening now, and for how an immigrant sees it.

The exhibit ties together the tensions between Lusmerlin’s native culture and her American experience, how the two sometimes work together and sometimes get pulled apart.

“If you’re not from the Dominican Republic, you don’t necessarily know how to interpret something,” Lusmerlin says. “So, I feel like the immigrant always has an education job to do, an emotional labor to do on behalf of the other person.”

“Big Bang Baby” is Lusmerlin’s sixth solo exhibit. She’s moved on from cement to art full-time, splitting her time between Columbia and Philadelphia.

The show runs through March 16 in the Horowitz Center at the college in Columbia. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. There’s a closing reception from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on the 15th.

The story of this moment in America is being told in many ways, and not just in the news or on social media or nationally televised events.

Sometimes you can find it in quiet little galleries tucked out of the way in a suburban community college.

You just have to be willing to look.