Cigarette butts used as art

Kat Wilson Roundup Reporter

When smokers discard their used cigarettes, the smoky stubs get tossed this way and that, making a huge mess.

Stephen Alamango, a Pierce College art student, took notice of all the cigarettes lodged in greenery or left on parking lot floors and decided to make an art project out of it.

His art piece, “The World is My Ashtray,” focuses on collecting the forgotten cigarette butts to make a statement.

“My mother was a smoker, so I suffered from second-hand smoking,” Alamango said. “But I don’t smoke. I hate it.”

He spends about an hour before class to collect cigarette butts around the planters in the Art Building’s courtyard, enough to fill a coffee canister.

“I’ve picked up enough to fill this can each morning,” Alamango said. “It’s funny because this is a non-smoking campus.”

He hopes to remind both smokers and non-smokers alike that trash doesn’t disappear as soon as it

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catch this whole side on fire.” leaves your fingertips.

“[My project] speaks for itself,” Alamango said. “It’s like a picture of a story that tells a thousand words.”

Although his pieces convey many messages, Alamango wants to focus on drawing attention to the absolute lack of care.

“We throw our cigarette waste out there, and it takes about 14 years before it biodegrades,” he said.

Alamango said that he found all of his cigarette pieces in kindling, with some still lit.

“It’s one in 250 — I calculated — that are still glowing,” Alamango said. “We just need one of those to

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He has crafted the discarded pieces into a shell that will go around the plants in the courtyard, like cacti and roses, to highlight the total lack of consideration.

“This is the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “There’s a lot more.”

The project reeks of stale smoke, so as not to invoke his classmates’ gag reflexes, he works outdoors. Alamango had tried to coat the bottom of his project with silicone to try to suppress some of the smell.

“He’s not allowed to bring the project inside,” said Melody Cooper, Alamango’s teacher in the Introduction to Ceramics class.

“He’s a lot better than he gives himself credit for,” said Nicholas Levonian, who has known Muñoz for 16 years. “He just kind of picked it up really quickly and really fast. While the rest of us were working on it, he just picked it up and thought ‘Well, this is easy’ and he got it and was having fun with it.”

By the time he left Birmingham High School, Muñoz had learned to play the tenors drum set, the snare, the piano and the xylophone as a part of his alma mater’s marching band.

As his high school’s concert season approached, Muñoz learned to play the trumpet, melophone, french horn and baritone. For jazz band, he learned to handle the saxophone.

After high school he tried the student orchestra on campus.

“The student orchestra is an interesting experience. It’s a good orchestra where intermediate and advanced students are simply challenged to a level where music is easy,” Muñoz said.

That same semester and year in the fall of 2009, James Domine, who instructs the student orchestra at Pierce, asked Muñoz to further challenge his musical skills and join the SFV Symphony Orchestra.

“Chris is a very talented young man who demonstrates a lot of musical ability. He plays and is a very capable violinist,” Domine said. “He shows a lot of promise and quite a musical career ahead of him if he chooses to do that.”

According to Muñoz, his studies in linguistics and music come hand in hand. In linguistics, he is able to translate and understand foreign culture according to movement, speech and sound. Muñoz then explained that music is a universal language and is understood around the world with different cultures.

“Music is a very important part of everyone’s life, whether they know it or not,” Muñoz said.