A sparrow flies across the paper being pulled from one spool to another within a box. As the story cranks slowly across the scroll the bird flies by squirrels, bison, and elephants printed onto the paper in a silhouetted landscape of trees. 

The traditional moving picture on scrolling paper is Jessica White’s first crankie. 

“I’ve noticed for a lot of people, the first time they see a crankie, there’s just like this spark that happens and you’re just drawn in and it becomes like a magical moment,” she said. 

A crankie is a story of moving pictures in a box made of any material and cranked to advance the story. 

White, an artist who moved to Asheville in 2009, creates prints and art books.  She discovered crankies during a 2010 performance by Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle at Warren Wilson College. 

The pair, who perform as Anna and Elizabeth, toured the country with their crankies even heading to NPR’s Tiny Desk concert in 2015 to share their “mural on the spool.” 

Their art inspired White.

“It was kind of a mind-blowing experience because I’d been struggling making these scrolls work and trying to navigate through how to make scrolls, and then I saw crankies and I realized, ‘Oh, this is exactly what my scrolls need to be,’” she said. 

Although Anna and Elizabeth pair their crankies with traditional Appalachian ballads, crankies aren’t solely unique to Appalachia. 

“The ancestor of the crankie is the scrolling panorama, which had a bit of a vogue around the turn of the last century. They were a pre-film way to entertain large groups, usually with informative (or even propaganda) stories of battles, whaling voyages, or foreign lands,”  LaPrelle told Cordella Press.

White said these panoramas could extend around an entire room and other cultures have similar storytelling devices around the world

White, who was born in Taiwan, moved to central North Carolina when she was nine. In college, she studied sculpture at East Carolina University. That’s where she got a job in the university library and began working in the book conservation lab. 

“They pulled me back into this back room and gave me a little test to see how well I worked with rulers and Exacto blades and glue. I didn’t know what exactly was going on,” White said. 

White works also works as a print maker and has a variety of presses and type in her home studio in Asheville. Lilly Knoepp/NC Local

The experience marked the beginning of her fascination with paper art. She said she views books as vessels for creative voice. 

“If you think about how many different kinds of books there are in the world, that’s how many different ways you can use it as an art form,” White said. The physical elements of a book can also shed light on aspects of culture and history. 

“We [have] learned so much about human civilizations and our histories by the books that we made. They are really different all around the world based on whatever materials are available and what kind of structure they needed, from Chinese bamboo scrolls to parchment books that were made in Europe to papyrus, which [was] really popular in Northern Africa,” White said. 

After studying book arts at Iowa State University and earning a Masters of Fine Arts in printmaking, White was drawn to Western North Carolina. 

The art community in Asheville included local book artist Daniel Essig and Asheville BookWorks. 

Since then, arts communities around the region have grown, producing events like The Big Crafty, a bi-annual weekend craft fair for makers of all kinds. White was one of the organizers of a zine fest in 2016, to celebrate the art of creating handmade magazines.

When she attended the Minneapolis Crankie Festival in 2024, she decided to bring the craft back to WNC by hosting her own crankie event in Buncombe County. Along with friend and fellow artist Molly Sawyer, White organized the inaugural Crankie Fest to be held this weekend in Asheville.  

White said she hopes Crankie Fest and other community events help build more support for rising artists – especially those who are still rebuilding after Hurricane Helene. 

“It’s just a way to create that kind of a network and like some support systems to lift up some of the artists here that maybe don’t have as much of a voice,” she said. 

Here’s the full list of the artists participating in Asheville Crankie Fest at The Grey Eagle on Jan. 10: 

• Jen Murphy with musician Allan Wolf
• Tom Eure and Amelia Osbourne
• Federica Collina
• Toybox 
• Primrose Coke
• Puppeteer Edwin Salas 
• Jessica White with musicians Kevin Kehrberg and Jeff Keith
• Molly Sawyer

Find out more on their Instagram. 

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