Standing on the first floor of Facility, the sprawling live-work space in Old Irving Park, Bob Faust is surrounded by years of ideas.
On one worktable, a printed bandana lies spread open, its yellow field ringed by words. Nearby, long flagpoles striped in pink, teal and orange lean against a brick wall. Elsewhere, a gray pinboard holds scraps of pattern, prototype images and other graphic experiments.
The colorful ephemera are, in fact, the raw material for the latest iteration of Faust’s yearslong project “Ways & Means,” a visual meditation on the values that shape civic life and a shared sense of belonging in an increasingly divided America.
In September, Faust, 59, brought “Ways & Means” to Navy Pier, where a new installation debuted in conjunction with the sprawling Chicago Live! Festival. The exhibition is now traveling to Madison Square Park in New York and later in October to the Illinois Governor’s Mansion, where the flags will be installed across the lawn from Oct. 22 through Election Day.
The idea first emerged when Faust, who has worked for 30 years as a graphic designer, found himself in a state of shock and grief in the wake of the 2016 election. “It was literally born as just like a gut response to Trump actually getting in office,” Faust recalls. “It was a mind-blowing thing.”
That gut response turned into a set of words, or tenets, that Faust hoped he — and other Americans — could hold onto in what he believed would be turbulent times. The list included “compassion,” “joy,” “humility,” “strength,” “love” and “faith,” among others.
“They are values or morals you think about when raising your kid,” says Faust, whose daughter was 14 at the time. “The ideas you hope they learn to live by.”
Faust assigned each of the words a graphic identity: “civility,” for example, is set within a multicolor perimeter while “trust” stretches across a soft pink-to-teal gradient. He then pasted them across the windows of Rootwork Gallery, a Northwest Side art space, where they remained for the better part of a year.
Four years later, in 2021, Faust, along with the artist Nick Cave, his partner in life and art, wrapped eight CTA Green Line cars, inside and out, in the same designs as a way to encourage Chicago commuters to return to public transit after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then, last spring, Faust connected with Good Chaos, a Chicago studio and arts incubator, to revive the idea once again. This time, the images were applied to flags. The effort is a response to his sense that the American flag has increasingly been claimed as a symbol of the political right.
“I have a visceral reaction now when I see the American flag,” says Faust. “I feel like, whose is that? And then I get mad because that’s our flag. It’s ours. It’s representative of democracy.”
In the fall exhibitions, Faust’s flags, printed on a durable, double-sided fabric designed to withstand the lakefront wind, fly alongside the American flag. For the artist, the gesture is not about rejecting the national symbol but reclaiming its possibilities.
“It’s not me making a new flag or cutting up the American flag because I don’t agree with it,” he says. “It’s me using that container to say, let’s look back at the great American we.”
For Elizabeth Armour, managing director of Good Chaos, the power of the project lies in how easily its language can move between contexts. “What do we all have in common?” says Armour. “Bob’s tenets are things that so many people can agree upon. We want civility in our neighborhoods and communities. We want joy in our everyday lives. And we respect faith, and we need the truth.”
Since June, Good Chaos and Faust have been experimenting with that question in increasingly public settings, working with a rotating group of dancers who carry the flags in a processional performance. The first was a bombastic parade at the Obama Presidential Center in June, bringing Faust’s flags together with Nick Cave’s Soundsuits and the Kenwood Academy drum line. After that, the project traveled to a Fourth of July parade in Cincinnati, the opening parade of the Iowa State Fair, and, earlier this month, Madison Square Park in New York City.
The performances, says Faust, give the ideas a physical form. “The dancers are the ones interpreting how the tenets look in the body.”
Faust has also printed 8,000 polysilk bandanas — or “freedom flags,” as he calls them — miniature versions of the larger flags that he and the Good Chaos team distribute at the events. At Navy Pier in September, Faust had 1,000 to hand out to audiences. After the fall, wherever the bandanas go is how the project continues. That unpredictability is part of their appeal: People can wear them, transform them or simply carry them home. “If you carry a bandana with you, you’re now part of the project,” says Faust. And in that way, he adds, “the project does live forever.”
