MLK 3000 Students Put Final Touches on Art for Final Showcase
- Samantha Siedow
- May 5
- 4 min read
By: Samantha Siedow
April 15, 2025
The classroom buzzed with excitement as MLK 3000 immersion students put the finishing touches on their projects ahead of a final showcase.
In a basement room of Ford Hall now resembling an art studio, students with paint-stained clothes and pencils in hand sat on the ground or perched on desks immersed in their works. Scattered scraps of paper filled the room as students prepared artistic works reflecting what they learned from the immersion class and trip.
As part of the MLK 3000 immersion class, students went on a week-long trip during spring break to the South, visiting historic civil rights locations like the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, and the site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, and hearing from activists including Bettie Mae Fikes of Selma, Alabama, and Leroy Clemons of Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Organized largely by the students themselves, the showcase will take place April 15 at Northrop’s Best Buy Theater on the University of Minnesota’s East Bank campus. The event will feature poetry, visual art and spoken word pieces, all created by students to reflect themes that resonated with them during their experience.
Tarran Austin, a 20-year-old second-year English major from North Minneapolis, is one of the students sharing her work. Austin wrote a poem on grief, inspired by her visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice — the nation’s first memorial to lynching victims — in Montgomery.
“I felt sad, and I kind of got, like, teary-eyed while writing it and reading it aloud, because I think what I wrote was beautiful, and I want people to feel those feelings as well,” Austin said.
Although confident in her craftsmanship and public speaking, Austin said this is her first time writing poetry. She said she found it meaningful to create art that represents her life and the Black experience, a perspective often underrepresented in creative spaces.
“That reclaiming of our stories and telling them, not sugar-coating them and just blatantly saying this is what's going on, and this is the Black experience or this is what people can resonate with that look like me, I think that's important historically for rebellion, individualism, and promoting the community in a positive way,” Austin said.
Constantine Osuji, a 20-year-old psychology and human resources major from St. Paul, also stepped outside his comfort zone for the showcase. Osuji, who does not consider himself an artist, drew a piece to reflect both personal and broader themes from the immersion trip.
Osuji drew two linked hands in blue and red to symbolise a future of unity among Black and African communities, groups he said have historically experienced division, something he’s observed as the community engagement coordinator for the university's Black Student Union.
“I feel like the past is where a lot of these negative ideas on one another are coming from,” Osuji said. “It's all things we learned growing up from our ancestors. So I'm focusing on the present and the future.”
Evan Johnson, the university associate director of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion who leads the class, said having students lead the planning of the final showcase helps them process how the trip impacted them.
“I've seen that helps them feel a sense of ownership of what their story was and how it's a part of this larger story of their holistic experience,” Johnson said.
As an educator, Johnson said he knows students often have a very rigid pre-determined structure that can put them on autopilot and not give them space to decide what is most important to them.
“I hope that the showcase and the fact that it requires creativity helps them feel inspired to keep being creative and try to think outside of the box when it comes to activism, different and deeper intentional things around societal change,” Johnson said.
Vianney Cortes Perez, a 24-year-old second-year environmental geography major from Rochester, created a two-part project combining spoken word and visual art. Perez felt a single medium wouldn’t fully capture the theme she wanted to express, which involved the lynching and liberation of African Americans.
“Translating (emotions) on a painting or a monologue, I think in some way releases all of these really heavy, hard emotions that we experienced on the trip and kind of gives them a new form or like a new life,” Perez said.
Perez said creating art has been a way for her to process the complex feelings of grief and hope she experienced on the immersion trip, and distill that impact into a presentation to bring other people a piece of that experience.
“I wanted to put everything that was really hard and painful into some sort of concise statement and deliver it in some way that makes sense.”
