The Crankie Show

2025 The crankie show

Site: Performances were held at the Barking Legs Theater in May 2025. 

Artists: Randall Jones, deMichael McGee, Mark Mayfield, Dominique Pruitt, Bill Sera, David Hudson, Kathleen Williams, Clair Donohue, David Dunn, Gini White, and Anonymous.

Writer: Peggy Douglas, Visual Art Director: Frances McDonald, Technical Director: Taylor Boyd, Crankie Box Fabricator: Randy Fairchild and narrators Peggy Douglas and Ray Bassett.

 Partners: The AIM Center, Southern Exposure and Mark Making

Description: The Crankie Show is a performance piece featuring, a collection of stories from eleven artists living with serious mental illnesses, told for the first time through scrolls featuring illustrations of their lives. The scrolls are housed in “crankie boxes”, also hand painted by the artists, where images are scrolled as their stories unfold.

The scroll images were created at the AIM Center facilitated by Judith Mogul; the boxes were painted at Mark Making. Their stories were collected by Peggy Douglas who transcribed them into poetic monologues which were read concurrently with the cranking of the images. The narrators were Peggy Douglas and Ray Bassett.