Community Projects
Earthwork Farm Artist Residency
Our home-base for creativity and connectivity is the Earthwork Farm. Located outside of Lake City Michigan, Earthwork Farm has been a center for cultural events and community learning for over 40 years. Many of our favorite events are hosted at this location, including annual events like Skill Swap and Harvest Gathering.
Our residency program invites artists from various disciplines to write, record, mediate and create, right here on the Farm. Most of our residencies have taken place at the House on the Hill, a beautiful hexagon cabin with a clawfoot tub, an upright piano, skylights, a woodstove and a beautiful view of the pastures and woodlots at Earthwork Farm.
This past year, we have been working hard to maintain the physical spaces, while looking to strengthen and grow our residency program. Recent residencies have included Penguin/Random House author Antonio Michael Downing, folk/electronic recording artist Steve Leaf, jazz bassist Ian Thompson, singer-songwriter Sari Brown, Mellow Music Group producer The Lasso, saxophonist Jarad Selner, and cellist Jordan Hamilton.
Annual Songwriters' Summit for Resilience
Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned writer there is a place for you to learn, write, retreat, connect. This annual event brings the community together to talk and discuss various songwriting techniques, helpful listening exercises and offer other important tools crafted to encourage inspiration and creativity.
This year, our Summit was held virtually. Six members of the collective presented a selection of topics including: Turning Rants into Tunes and Collaborative Songwriting for Collective Liberation. “Connecting across distance through singing and songwriting allowed us to create a shared heart space and build community with fellow songwriters.” - Joe Reilly
Earthwork Music Songwriters' Summit is held at Circle Pines Center (CPC) each year, a member-based, cooperatively-governed, non-profit retreat center in Delton, MI with 285+ acres of woods, hills, lake and trails. CPC is also the home of the annual Buttermilk Jamboree and the Midwest Mushroom Camp among other offerings.
photo credit: Nicholas James Thomasma
Youth Empowerment Projects
Throughout the years, Earthwork Music members have partnered with organizations such as SEEDS, The Gift Of Music, On Stage 4 Kids, Lost Voices and Music For Sprouts to offer music programming to youth. Please contact us if you’d like us to work with your school or organization.
Earthwork Harvest Gathering
Though Earthwork Music and The Earthwork Harvest Gathering are two different LLC‘s, these organizations are deeply linked. Earthwork Harvest Gathering creates an intergenerational safe space to cultivate healing, empowerment and collaborative community enrichment in a three-day cultural celebration on Earthwork Farm in rural Northern Michigan. Harvest Gathering celebrates diversity, practices inclusivity, and seeks to activate civic engagement and encourage social-ecological awareness among its attendees, volunteers, performers, vendors, staff, and guests through workshops, panel discussions, cultural traditions, and emphasis on local food and farming, in addition to a robust and eclectic offering of musical performances.photo credit: John Hanson
Independent Artist Promotions
Earthwork Music is a collective of independent artists living or connected to the Great Lakes region. One of our biggest areas of focus is promoting our artists’ work. From new singles and album releases to live and streaming concerts, our network connects thousands of fans to our collective’s creative work. It’s hard to estimate the amount of time any one work of art can represent for an artist. One song represents countless hours of creative work. One show can represent fifteen years of practice and emotional commitment to the craft. In addition, the Earthwork Music Store features albums, cds, tees and other band merchandise from all our collective members.
Skill Swap
Join us for this start-of-the-summer event where you learn, connect with good people, eat great food and experience exceptional music at Earthwork Farm. Crosshatch, along with Title Track and Human Nature School, presents a full day of hands-on workshops, a farm-to-table dinner, barn dance and evening concerts. Choose from over twenty classes in the areas of art, earth, the real home-ec, tinkering and discussion circles. After the day of workshops, stick around for an on-farm, locally procured dinner, an evening contra dance hour, followed by music in the barn.photo credit: Gary Howe
The Long Memory Project
The Long Memory Project’s mission is to cultivate the passing down of our community’s stories. Not just the ones considered worthy enough to make headlines and history books, but the small acts of courage, action, good governance and community building—the songs, poems and stories that help us understand where we came from, who we are, and what we envision for our future—both regionally and beyond. The Long Memory Project is a program of Crosshatch Center for Art & Ecology.photo credit: Gary Howe
Earthwork Detroit Music Festival
On July 10, 2019, Title Track, in collaboration with William Copeland (aka Will See) of Collective Wisdom Detroit and a network of partners (Earthwork Music, D.Cipher) brought the first annual Earthwork Detroit Music Festival to Detroit. Inspired by the Earthwork Harvest Gathering, this FREE, all-ages, one day happening took place on the Campbell Terrace Stage as a fundraiser for the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN) in a collaborative effort to celebrate cultural resilience and our local social ecologies. The musical lineup proudly featured local and regional treasures offering folk, hip-hop, funk, soul and rock-n-roll. Community leaders addressed the crowd representing a variety of local cultural and organizing efforts. Youth programming was central to the event including a kids concert and interactive workshops throughout the afternoon and evening on topics including songwriting, poetry writing, and permaculture.photo credit: Charity Rachele
Earthwork Covers Earthwork Project
In 2016, the Earthwork Music Collective launched this ongoing project based in mutual love and admiration. This collection celebrates the richness of the collective's body of work and our culture of collaboration. Stay tuned for the next edition of Earthwork Covers Earthwork.
