Camouflage, Codes & Connections, 2026

4-color digital print on vinyl
Variable Dimensions
Percheron Bar rooftop and lobby, Crossroads Hotel, Kansas City
Curator: Petrichor Projects, Tiffany Meesha Thompson
Fabricator: 31 Printing
Photographer: E.G. Schempf  

During Prohibition, the building that now houses the Crossroads Hotel held its secrets close. As a Pabst Blue Ribbon distribution warehouse, it operated within a city-wide network of coded language and covert supply chains. Survival depended on knowing the right phrase, the right door, the right way to hide something in plain sight. As Prohibition's morality campaign aimed at immigrant and working-class communities whose way of life had been deemed un-American, those who moved beer through this warehouse refused the moral verdict through acts of resistance, and it is that refusal which artist Bob Faust has embodied in Camouflage, Codes & Connections, a new permanent installation spanning the Crossroads Hotel's rooftop bar, Percheron. Through the transformation of the building's own fragments and memory, he has made that history visible.

Faust gathered the building's residue, vintage Pabst labels, the braided manes of the Percheron horses for which the bar is named, carrier pigeons, the peregrine falcon, hops, soap, poppies, each chosen for its history, its metaphor, and the memory of a world that once depended on this building to survive. Each image is a record of survival, covert connection, disappearance, and return.

Each photographic fragment is broken apart, mirrored, tiled, and composited until its origin becomes difficult to locate. The Percheron mane becomes a silver-grey field of interlocking geometry. The Pabst label dissolves into a lattice of orange, teal, and ivory. The hops tiles into organic medallions. This is the form of camouflage in the work: the transformation of the recognizable into the abstract, the historical into the decorative.

Faust puts coded language directly on the walls, honoring the communities who have survived through quiet acts of resistance. The speakeasy password "Joe sent me," the phrase exchanged at the door to gain entry, is embedded within the structural grid of one of the brick buildings framing the rooftop's north terrace, readable only to those who know what they are looking for. On the second, "Friend of Dorothy," the queer signal for safe company and recognition among strangers, organizes the composition of the facade, arguing that coded language is a living inheritance, one that belongs as much to the present as to the history it came from. That resilience lives in every surface of this work, and it lives in the Crossroads Hotel, a place that celebrates the communities around it and believes that everyone who arrives already belongs here.

You meet the Percheron horse in the lobby before you understand what you are looking at. The breed that once powered the brewery's distribution operation now lives in the walls, its mane and tail transformed into architectural surface. This is a work about what communities do with the places that shape them, how they carry those histories, hide them, pass them forward, and refuse to let them disappear. That refusal is resilience, and Faust has placed it throughout Percheron so it lives alongside everyone who gathers here.

Camouflage, Codes & Connections was curated by Petrichor Projects and is on permanent view in Percheron at the Crossroads Hotel, Kansas City, Missouri.