Richard Trumka with LaToya Ruby Frazier, David Green, and Timothy O’Hara

Richard L. Trumka is president of the 12.5-million-member American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. An outspoken advocate for social and economic justice, Trumka is the nation’s clearest voice on the critical need to ensure that all workers have a good job and the power to determine their wages and working conditions. He heads the labor movement’s efforts to create an economy based on broadly shared prosperity and to hold elected officials and employers accountable to working families.

In 1982, at the age of 33, Trumka ran on a reform ticket and was elected the youngest president of the United Mine Workers of America. Trumka was elected AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer in 1995 and held that post until 2009, when he was elected president. As Trumka looks forward, he envisions rising wages, equal pay, respect at work, safe jobs, secure retirement, and the freedom for all workers to form or join unions and bargain collectively. He knows what it will take to get there: solidarity and commitment.

LaToya Ruby Frazier is known for collaborating with the people who appear in her photographs, videos, texts, and performances to share their varied stories. Her work has been exhibited widely, including solo and group exhibitions at Mudam, Luxembourg; CAPC musée d’art contemporain in Bordeaux, France; the Brooklyn Museum; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Seattle Art Museum; the 2012 Whitney Biennial, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, among other institutions and festivals. Frazier is currently associate professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and represented by Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York | Rome. She is also the recipient of fellowships from numerous organizations including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2015), TED Fellows program (2015), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2014). She was recently named the inaugural recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation / Steidl Book Prize.

Both David Green and Timothy O’Hara were essential to The Last Cruze exhibition and the extensive timeline provided in the gallery guide. Frazier dedicated the exhibition to the brothers and sisters of the United Automobile Workers, Ironworkers, Teamsters, and United Steelworkers at the General Motors Lordstown Complex, Magna International, Jamestown Industries, Leadec Industrial Services, Comprehensive Logistics, Auto Warehousing Company, Cassens Transport, and their families. Former UAW Local 1112 President Green was forced to accept a transfer to GM Bedford Castings Operations in Indiana and resign his union position. Retired from GM, O’Hara took up the role of UAW Local 1112 President in August 2019 in the wake of Green’s departure.