Angel Lesnikowski: The Cigarette Box Project
The PC Art Gallery featured the work of Artist and PC art professor Angel Lesnikowski for the opening of The Cigarette Box Project, a haunting look at themes of foresight, the desert, and death - using cigarette boxes as the primary medium. Take a look at the video above for more on this amazing show from the artist herself.
Angel Lesnikowski's paintings blend emotional clarity with formal precision, balancing the urgency of lived experience with rigorous composition. Her practice is deeply committed to truth-telling—exploring themes of erasure, feminism, and identity—while equally embracing joy, beauty, and refuge. This orientation allows her compelling and accessible work to inhabit a space of both critique and inquiry.
This exhibition offers a deeply personal meditation on memory, inheritance, and mortality, centered around Angel Lesnikowski: The Cigarette Box Project. Through painting, installation, and mixed media, Lesnikowski transforms discarded objects and personal history into intimate reflections on fear and remembrance.
The core of the project features hundreds of hand-painted cigarette boxes depicting desert landscapes. These vistas symbolize both beauty and threat, drawing
from her father’s life as a desert cowboy and her mother’s Middle Eastern upbringing.
Each box becomes a small vessel of memory, connecting individual experience to cultural
loss and the story of stolen land.
Lesnikowski’s works meditate on resilience and the fragile negotiations of living. She extends a lineage of landscape painting, where the scene is a site of metaphysical encounter, akin to Caspar David Friedrich. By choosing discarded cigarette boxes as her substrate, she brings this tradition into the present, reflecting the conditions of the Anthropocene—where consumption, extraction, and waste are entangled with the landscapes we inherit. Transforming refuse into images of beauty and memory, Lesnikowski reveals how the fragile, the disposable, and the sublime are part of the same world.
Exhibition Details
Angel Lesnikowski: The Cigarette Box Project will be open Monday–Thursday, 12:00–4:00 PM, through December 12.
For more information, contact Porterville College Art Gallery Director Theodore Lyons at theodore.lyons@portervillecollege.edu.
