Cider Creek Collective is an artist residency and community ceramic studio located 2 miles from the Pacific Ocean on a 170 year old Victorian homestead. Surrounded by heirloom orchards and gardens, coastal forests, and a vibrant local community of homesteading families perched above the Albion River, emerging and working artists live and work alongside Co-owners/Directors Jess Thompson and Nick Schwartz and their two young children Archer and Phoenix. Nick and Jess have been hosting and mentoring resident artists, visitors, and students in their studio for many years, previously on a 27 acre property on Flynn Creek in Comptche. For two decades, Flynn Creek Pottery hosted ceramicists, circus performers, musicians, farmers, families, and many other creative hardworking folks; many of those same artists still come to visit, stay, and work year after year. 

In 2021, Jess and Nick purchased one of the oldest homesteads on the Mendocino Coast, for many years a beloved retreat center appropriately named “Hearts and Hands at Cider Creek”. Like Flynn Creek Pottery, Hearts and Hands nurtured idealism, creative vitality, and growth for many people, so it’s fitting that it’s still providing creative people with a place to grow. Hence Nick and Jess’s extended family, living and working together, has evolved into the “Cider Creek Collective”.