Guess it’s now official enough to post about: I am an AmeriCorps member.

I won’t say I got a ‘job’, they call it service. For the next year, my service will be as a full-time artist-in-residence with the Community Arts Collective, which is funded by AmeriCorps and hosted in Baltimore at the Maryland Institute College of Art, which I got a nice tour of today.

No, I’m not working at MICA per se, though I get some staff privileges, hence the badge. MICA will serve mainly as a kind of home base, my actual program assignment is the Refugee Youth Project that operates at a few local schools.

(A lot of layers to this, makes your head spin… I’m even leaving one layer out).

Basically I’ll be helping refugee kids through after-school arts programming, teaching them photography in my Crandall-verse way and supporting them more generally (like helping the teachers who are teaching them English). I’m still in training mode for a few weeks, we’ll see exactly what they need and how it will go.

All of it will be an extreme honor. I told a friend not long ago, when I was first back from Kenya, that what I really wanted to do was community service through the arts. To be a community arts warrior, take my photo teaching from the classroom to the community, build community and resilience through the arts.

And that’s what I found, kind of a miracle. There are many battles to wage right now, happy this is mine for a while. Standing with refugees, in the way that I know how.

To be honest, as a DC native I’m excited to dive into Baltimore’s arts landscape, which is extensive and quite different than DC’s, in some ways deeper. Will be a nice change of scenery. Bit of a drive, yeah, but I like Baltimore, though my last real experience there was more years ago than I care to count. Here are some cityscapes from a Baltimore body of work I was building at one point:

Notebook