Most people with visual art degrees don't end up "using" their degree as a primary career.  While I would argue the meaning of "using" any kind of college degree, I certainly can't claim to have landed an "art job" after graduation.  I've taken what I feel must be a common route and begun a career in the non-profit sector.  (As a side note, that explains my disappearance for two weeks as I most certainly did use my degree to help write 17 grants to help local schools).

Sort of disenfranchised by the "art world" and sick of feeling like New York City was the center of everything that mattered, I struggled in my last semester of undergrad to figure out what "career" really meant to me.  I knew one thing: it didn't mean money and corporate success, though I know I could succeed in that sense if I had the inclination.  So I signed on for a year of AmeriCorps*VISTA (think domestic Peace Corps) and found a niche in a quirky but awesome non-profit here in Baltimore.

I made a choice.  Plenty of my former colleagues are probably sucking up to galleries trying to get representation, and I know a few have found very well-deserved success.  But I made another choice and created a different identity for myself.  Now I have a choice again.  My VISTA year is ending, and as of August 15 I am no longer property of the U.S. Government.

What will I do?  I have a choice to stay in the vein of urban public education, stay in the vein of urban youth, stay in non-profits, or start over entirely.  This process of reinventing myself every year or two has to stop.  For one, I have a lot of trouble concentrating on the "fun" side of life when all I have done for the past six years is change concentrations, schools, jobs, and towns.  By signing on for a year-long contract position, I've forced myself to make another choice and another change.

Though my diploma calls me an artist, I could be happy at any job and do well almost anywhere I landed.  The question is, how many of those jobs really matter?  Last night as I was falling asleep I thought of all the children I have gotten to know in Baltimore this year and wondered where they were sleeping, what their houses were like.  I wondered how, having done so much, I can just walk away, another college-educated white person who has done a year's time in the inner city trying to make the world a better place.  That's not me.  Personally, if I believe in something I want it to be a way of life.  I can't walk away from all those children to work in the coat room at the BMA, or even to be an office manager at Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts.  Can I?

Again I'm at this crossroads with my career, wondering which identify I want to run with this time: the visual artist; the nerdy kid who loved physics, calculus, and psychology (though not necessarily in that order); the writer; the Habitat for Humanity volunteer; the underpaid non-profit employee who worked overtime with a team to put in $250,000 in grant proposals last week; or the woman who worked tirelessly in a public school in Baltimore for the past year.  Somewhere, sometime in the next few weeks, I'll find it.