The Pickup's Arts & Culture coverage is supported by Brut Hotel, featuring a rooftop VIP after party for Tulsa Irish Fest on March 14.
Deadly Prey Gallery Pop-Up
Mixed-Use Space Tulsa
February 23, 2026
A drag queen strikes Bobby Hill’s “Tartuffe, the Spry Wonderdog” pose while driving a broomstick through the eye socket of what is presumably Pierce Brosnan, as the disproportionately large, disembodied torso of Joe Pesci grabs her loafer-clad foot in place of a jester’s poulaine. You didn’t have a stroke reading that. I just described Ghanaian artist Leonardo’s Mona Lisa: a Mrs. Doubtfire film poster.
This phantasmagorically rendered tableau, a viral image beloved for its hilariously gory absurdity, is possibly the best known in Deadly Prey’s massive collection of Ghanaian film adverts. But in Deadly Prey’s traveling gallery pop-up at Mixed-Use Space Tulsa last Monday, it was a relatively tame piece in the grand guignol that is their archive of over 500 hand-painted Ghanaian movie posters.
Deadly Prey Gallery was founded in Chicago by Brian Chankin in partnership with his best friend, Robert Kofi, to preserve the batshit beauty of Ghana’s mobile cinema advertising. In Ghana’s peak mobile cinema era of the 1980s and 1990s, film operators traveled with televisions, VCRs, generators, and tapes to screen films in towns and villages, and commissioned artists to paint ultraviolent, hypersexual, and/or otherwise outlandish posters (often on sewn-together flour sacks) to entice customers into their covered wagons. See: Mrs. Doubtfire pulling a Lucio Fulci.
The otherworldly images are iconic and beloved by all manner of cinephiles, as evidenced by the crowdsourced nature of their venue booking. Deadly Prey announced their tour on Instagram with a hole on the Tulsa date, and within minutes they received an avalanche of hosting offers and requests from obvious choices like Circle Cinema to bars, galleries, and the lucky winner, Mixed-Use Space Tulsa (M.U.S.T.), a community-driven, LGBTQ+ friendly, multi-purpose event, coworking, studio and gallery space in Kendall Whittier.
Cruising through Deadly Prey’s archive of prints online is a pleasure, but seeing the life size originals in person was a privilege. M.U.S.T. was papered wall to wall and floor to ceiling with the gorgeous and grotesque Ghanaian artifacts, enveloping patrons in a kaleidoscopic vestibule of insanity. Kermit the Frog and Garfield (the Cat) had Uzis; E.T. posed with Michael Jackson and Alien’s facehugger; the Seinfeld gang was flanked by demons and snakes occupying ocular cavities; and Norma from Twin Peaks had massive twin double-J honkers.