About Us
Union Hall Harts is a project of the UNITE HERE Education and Support Fund (501c3) that explores new ways of building power for working people by shaping culture and by investing in the latent creativity that exists within the labor movement and adjacent working-class communities.
To launch this program, UHESF is working with two leaders based in Michigan:
Annemarie Strassel is a union leader, artist and cultural historian based in Detroit. She is a Senior Director with UNITE HERE, the union of hospitality workers across North America, and the founder of Union Hall Arts. She has 25 years of experience with the union movement, first as a union member and organizer and later as a campaign strategist, serving as UNITE HERE’s Director of Communications for more than a decade. In that role, she led groundbreaking campaigns to win better working conditions for hospitality workers while building a national network of strategic media specialists to support those efforts. Today, Strassel leads Union Hall Arts, bringing together emerging voices and established artists in the union movement to unleash the working-class creativity desperately needed for our times. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University and has taught in the Department of Fashion Studies at Columbia College Chicago. She grew up in Ypsilanti, Michigan and currently lives with her family in Detroit.
Wes Taylor is a print maker, designer, musician, place-maker, space-keeper, educator, and curator. His practice is rooted in performance and social justice. His work combines, oscillates between, and blurs disciplines—both multi-disciplinary as well as anti-disciplinary. His individual practice is inextricably linked to the constellation of collectives and networks he has formed over 20 years. Those collectives include: Complex Movements, Talking Dolls Detroit, Emergence Media, Design Justice Network, Athletic Mic League, and All Faux Everythings. Hiswork is inspired by elder knowledge, complex science, 90s underground Hip Hop, funk, 80’s disco, punk aesthetics, and science fiction. He is a recent fellow of the OPI (Of Public Interest) Lab at the Kungl. Konsthögskolan in Stockholm, Sweden. He is an associate professor at Wayne State University and a member of Wayne Academic Union (WAU), AAUP-AFT Local 6075.
Taylor has been awarded the 2026 United States Artists Knight Art+Tech Creative Capital, NEFA, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Knight Foundation. He was a 2021-’22 Sundance Art of Practice Fellow, 2019 United States Artist Fellow, and a 2018-’19 Santa Fe Institute Artist-in-Residence.
His writing appears in AIGA, and MDWfair. His work has been featured in Vice, Fader, Complex, The Wall Street Journal, and Art in America. It has been written about by authors such as Robin DG Kelly, Jeff Chang, Adrienne Marie Brown, and Ijeoma Oluo.
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Union Hall Arts is a Project of the UNITE HERE Education and Support Fund (501c3)
275 7th Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY 10001
Contact us at [email protected]