A “friend to the city for 100 years,” the Hollywood church has fostered relationships in the community that help them meet the needs of those who come through their doors. The church’s current partnership with social services agency The People Concern’s Studio 526 demonstrates the active and practical outworking of the Christian faith that has come to define the “purple church” in Hollywood.
“At Studio 526, we have a free art studio for the Skid Row community—for anybody who’s ever experienced homelessness, is currently homeless, or is at risk of becoming homeless,” shared Alice Corona, Arts Program Manager, Studio 526. “It’s a beautiful space where people could come and do artwork and be creative.”
“The work we do here at Hollywood and the work that [Studio 526] does in Skid Row really had the same goals, the same impact on our community and individuals,” Mae Chinn, longtime member at Hollywood church, explained, “and there was this common ground.”
The fruit of this joint interest took the form of a collaborative art exhibit that opened this May in the Hollywood church lobby featuring the work and stories of 15 artists. “There’s something, as David Bentley Hart says, about beauty that’s indispensable to the very nature of God,” noted Greg Hoenes, who currently serves as the interim pastor at Hollywood church, returning after pastoring the church from 1997-2004. “And when we express ourselves as an extension of the creativity of God, I think something amazing happens.”
After experiencing long covid, Gerardo Rivas, one of the artists, recalled going through a tough time and asking God, “What’s next in my life?” God answered Hollywood Church Partners With Studio 526 to Host “We Are the Light” Art Gallery through Rivas’s artistic expression. “I’m a life, a testimony, a person that can say that through art, one can be healed in your physical body. God is repairing my physical body—emotional and spiritual.”
Many of those who come to the studio, Corona explained, have been living through trauma. “When you’re surviving, you don’t have a space to be creative,” she said. “When you come to the studio and you haven’t done art in years, maybe, and you start seeing that person just start being creative, you start seeing something wake up in that person and the excitement that they get. They’ll tell me, ‘I haven’t done art since I was in kindergarten’ or ‘I didn’t know I was an artist.’ You see a release and healing of that, and it’s just so powerful.”
The exhibit will run through July 27, 2025.
