Hi, I am Amira Vanest and this year I am the Harrison Center intern in charge of IMAF (Independent Music + Art Festival). I am currently a rising Senior at Herron High School and have been working on IMAF for the past couple of months for my junior year internship.

I have had the privilege of being an intern for the Harrison Center since 2019, working on FoodCon and writing letters to important and loved members of our community, as well as growing up in the communities that the Harrison Center has created and influenced.

To be able to coordinate IMAF is to be able to create what have been my favorite memories over the years. Saturday, June 19th is the Harrison Center’s 20th year of IMAF. For 20 years, they have brought together art, music, and the community to create an event that engages and excites the surrounding neighborhoods and the city. As a kid, every year I would spend all Saturday running around at IMAF trying to find the vendor with the perfect item that I was going to spend the money I had saved up on, after stopping to make sure I got ice cream and an ArtMix bowl. I still have much that I have bought over the years, including a stuffed animal elephant, lots of jewelry, an INDY home shirt, and a headband made of feathers, as well as the many artmix bowls that I have collected. From the youngest age, IMAF has influenced and inspired me, and helped cultivate my love of art.

When you are the audience at IMAF, it is easy to experience the result of the incredibly hard work that is put into creating the festival, however it is sometimes hard to think about. As I worked this year, I experienced both the struggles and the joys that go along with creating an event like this, and both of those feelings were heightened by the barriers created due to the pandemic. Every joyous success was followed by a roadblock that would appear out of nowhere, and every roadblock was faced head on to create that success once again. It seemed like a never ending cycle of panic and accomplishment.

I have been so lucky to have had help from our IMAF board and many others. It has been interesting as the IMAF board is filled with adults who watched me run around the City Gallery screaming as a child, or have been my teachers and I am now leading them and calling them by their first names. I am incredibly thankful for the chance to learn under and have help from Moriah Miller and Joanna Taft. To say that IMAF would not be possible with Moriah would be an understatement and the leadership and wisdom that Joanna has passed, will carry on in the rest of my life.

Every struggle and every taste of success has been worth it and has allowed me to know how proud I will be of this festival. My greatest hope is to look out the day of and watch the little children run around, taking in every moment, every craft, every piece of art and music with wide excited eyes as they form beautiful everlasting memories, watch the teenagers my age and young adults fully experience and enjoy the festival as they discover or grow their love of the arts, and watch parents, grandparents, and those who have seen years of culture and community, look out for the first time or maybe their 15th time on IMAF and watch with fond hearts as they reminisce on memories or watch new ones get made.

Meet Amira Vanest