Watch the world’s greatest stories unroll before your eyes! Baltimore’s beloved festival of scrolled panoramas, known as “crankies,” returns for its 11th year of fireside wonder!
The festival, the largest of its kind in the country, works with artists to showcase crankies from Baltimore and beyond! A crankie is basic in concept: it is a scroll that provides the visual narration to a story or song. Versions of the crankie have been around for hundreds of years, if not longer; their most recent iteration is directly linked to moving panoramas popular in the 19th Century. In recent years, artists have begun to embrace the intimacy of the format, creating multi-layered, immersive experiences for audiences.
On Sale:
Creative Alliance Members get discounts and early access to tickets! Join NOW to get your tickets today! On Sale for Members: October 21, 2024 On Sale for All: November 4, 2024
In-person:
FRI FEB 7 – 8pm SOLD OUT!
SAT FEB 8 – 4pm SOLD OUT!
SAT FEB 8 – 8pm SOLD OUT!
SUN FEB 9 – 3pm SOLD OUT! Virtual:
SAT FEB 8 – 8pm
All performances feature the same lineup of artists and musicians!
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Emily Schubert Crankie Fest Co-Curator and organizer Emily Schubert is an interdisciplinary artist, maker, farmer, and forager. She hails from the borderlands of Cincinnati, Ohio, and Northern Kentucky and currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She earned a degree in fiber and textile art from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has worked on costumes for traveling Broadway shows and participated in puppet theater festivals and workshops in Europe, Indonesia, and the United States. She is inspired by the fantastical and the everyday and how these shape peoples’ perception of the world. Drawing from mythology, folktales, memories, and personal experience, she creates narratives and characters that aim to make some sense of our existence by giving form to our collective anxieties and desires.
Erica Warren Erica Warren is a Black and Chamaru (Chamorro | Guam) illustrator, graphic designer and puppeteer. Erica was born and raised in Minneapolis and St. Paul. She found puppetry amidst the pandemic, which ignited a passion for shadow puppetry and the art of storytelling. In the following years, she incorporated her illustrative and graphic arts into her puppetry and explored many mediums. Erica has participated in Impact Theory of Mass Extinction (2022) Monkeybear Harmolodic Workshop (2022), New Puppet Works (2023), Full Moon Puppet Show (2022) and Puppetlab (2024). She currently lives in South Minneapolis.
Rae Red Rae Red (they/them) is a multimedia performer. They imbue their projects with playful sincerity while examining ideas of perception and transformation, often through the lens of trans futurity. Red has performed all over the country in too many spaces to name, including Mana Contemporary Chicago, Vox Populi, The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, WOW Theater NYC, and the Museum of Human Achievement. They have been awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship and 2 residencies at the Studios at Mass MoCA, they were a 2023 Sondheim Prize semifinalist and are a 2024 Rubys Grantee. Red holds a MFA from Towson University and a BA from Bard College. They are obsessed with portals right now.
Ursula Populoh Born in Germany 1942, Ursula Populoh emigrated to the US in 1985 with her two teenage children. She worked menial jobs until retirement, then walked the pilgrimage walk of Santiago di Compostela in the north of Spain in 2011. During this walk she decided to go to school and attended the Maryland College of Art at age 70. She graduated in 2015 and has since worked as an artist, performer, costume designer, and crankie maker. In her art, she focuses on folk art and storytelling, often telling stories from aspects of her own life.
Boxcutter Collective Boxcutter Collective is a New York City based political puppet troupe. It is made up of seven core members who met while working at Bread and Puppet Theater over many years and bonded over their shared passion for waving things around and pretending that the things are talking. This is called “puppetry,” and it is a highly respected artform in every culture except this one. Each member of the group brings a unique skill, each useless on its own, but taken together forming what can only be described as something undeniably existent. They are currently working on their new live anti-capitalist sci-fi musical puppet spectacle, Dimension Zero, which will premiere in the fall 2025.
The Lantern Sisters The Lantern Sisters (Katherine Fahey and Dan Van Allen) are based in Baltimore, Maryland. Folk art is not static; it shifts with the times, uncovering new meanings in old words, new ways of talking about the communal pathways that led us to where we are today. For artists Katherine Fahey and Dan Van Allen, Crankies are a way to interpret our uncertain times, to draw artistic inspiration and power from the sources of meaning in their lives. History, community, folk tales, ballads, live performance, and environmental instability all manifest in the sounds, feelings, and sensations that permeate their Crankies. Their work transports audiences to another time and place, with their authentic and personal interpretations of folk tales, oral histories, and songs of America and Canada.
Schroeder Cherry, Ed.D A native of Washington, D.C., Dr. Schroeder Cherry is a Baltimore based artist and puppeteer. He played with puppets as a child. In college he tried puppetry to see how he would respond to his childhood interest. Dr. Cherry has performed original shows with puppets in museums, libraries and cultural centers for adults and children across the U.S. Performances include: Can You Spell Harlem?, The Land of Primary Colors, Underground Railroad, Not A Subway, Tuskegee Airmen, How The Sun Came To The Sky, and The Civil Rights Children’s Crusade. He is featured in the 2024 PBS episode on PLAY, by Craft in America.
Celia Cackley Cecilia Cackley is a puppeteer, playwright and teaching artist based in Washington DC.
Matt Muirhead Matt Muirhead is a 51 year old father of two living in the Baltimore region since 2007. He makes art which features fantasy scenes of Baltimore architecture and dream-like apocalyptic scenarios. Matt’s crankie is a surrealist narrative that features hints of the United States’ current state, its history and it’s future. The music is played live on synthesizers and homemade instruments. Accompanying Matt is, his long-time collaborator Ryan Smith.
