LOS ANGELES -- Artist June Cigar is working on a new mosaic at the Star Apartments.

It was developed and is operated by Skid Row Trust's Star Apartments, a permanent supportive housing community for people who have experienced homelessness. 

The center provides housing for 100 formerly homeless individuals with special medical needs. It also boasts programs which include services such as arts education. 

“This is a commissioned piece for Piece by Piece," said Cigar. "I’m celebrating women that have survived homelessness and every other tragedy that we have survived in this country.”

Cigar has survived a lot in life herself. She’s a mother and a grandmother and on top of surviving breast cancer, she spent three and a half years living homeless on the streets of downtown, before finding housing at her daughter’s encouragement.

But after everything she went though, finding housing just wasn’t enough.

“I needed to find a program that was going to help me therapeutically, to do something with my hands to create the art. I always knew I had it in me,” said Cigar.

That’s when she joined Piece by Piece, an arts organization that teaches mosaic work in under-served communities, allowing participants grow in stages and eventually, to earn income as full-time artists creating large scale installations.

“It works with disenfranchised people. It works with marginalized populations,” said Leigh Adams, lead instructor at Piece by Piece. “Taking broken discarded materials and creating something whole and beautiful and worthy of public display is a metaphor that cannot be overrated.”

It’s a metaphor nobody takes for granted.

“You know, beauty is the eye of the beholder,” said Cigar. “But when you’re making something with your hands and you pull it up from your soul, it’s like your spirit soars.”

And so by recycling broken bottles into works of art, these artists, in their own way, are reaching for the stars.