| Why Archive New American
Radio? The New American Radio (NAR) series was launched in 1987 as a 13-part pilot edition with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) that subsequently leveraged a major grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NAR invited established and emerging artists from diverse ethnic backgrounds and with widely varying interests to participate in the radio production process: playwrights who might develop exciting radio equivalents to "Black Cinema" and "New Asian Cinema"; young musicians and audio artists whose work could engage with state-of-the-art sound technology and speak to young audiences with deep roots in popular culture; avant-garde radio artists from abroad who could offer different cultural sensibilities and bring intellectual complexity to radio work; master storytellers whose narratives could break open tired story formulas and speak with a contemporary voice; and performance artists with a natural affinity to fuse voice, sound, and music. In the process, NAR took on the exciting challenge of developing a vocabulary for emerging radio art genres, and of finding ways to make this as yet undeveloped field accessible to diverse audiences. It's key goals were to: (1) encourage the development of an artistic practice that recognized radio's distinct means, parameters and artistic possibilities; (2) make possible a body of radiophonic work that over time would prove of permanent value; and (3) include new and under-represented voices and works that brought alternative versions of reality to the medium. With ongoing support from the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts and others, NAR became the only nationally distributed, weekly radio art series in the country. Over the next decade (1989-1998), it commissioned, acquired and distributed over 300 radio art works to diverse broadcast and non-broadcast listening audiences. When it went off the air in the Spring of 1998, the series had long enjoyed a reputation, nationally and internationally, as the primary source of radio experimentation in America. It had also become an amazing cultural mirror of its time, both in regard to the issues it dealt with and the techniques and strategies used by its artists. New American Radio was able to attract such well known artists as playwright Maria Irene Fornes; performance artists Shelley Hirsch, Rinde Eckert and Rachel Rosenthal; composer/musicians Alvin Curran, Pauline Oliveros, Diamanda Galas, and Terry Riley; the noise rock band, Negativland; and visual artist Terry Allen. Some of them produced their first major radio/audio art work for NAR and continued thereafter to pursue an interest in radio production. Most of them created outstanding audio pieces that jumpstarted new radio genres. The series also encouraged an impressive number of young artists, some of whom are now widely recognized, such as playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Carl Hancock Rux; the sound design team, Earwax Productions of San Francisco; and Alaskan composer John Luther Adams. By encouraging artists who reflect on the medium as well as develop it—notably Gregory Whitehead, Jacki Apple, Charles Amirkhanian, and Helen Thorington—the series gave birth to a small yet significant and influential body of written work on the field. New American Radio strove for true diversity and achieved a great deal of it. Its artists are of many ethnic background and nationalities, students, seniors, gays, lesbians, and artists from all disciplines. By forming strategic alliances with National Public Radio's popular "NPR Playhouse" series (Playhouse carried 26 NAR works) and with international radio stations (over 30 works distributed in Canada, Europe and Australia), with its public presentations at non-broadcast venues (the Whitney Museum, for instance), and with its presence and success at international conferences and competitions (Prix Italia, Prix Futura, International Feature Conference), NAR offered its core artists a broad platform of listeners worldwide as well as new revenue streams. While NAR put radio art "made in the USA" on the map in countries as diverse as Finland, Poland and Russia, it also introduced American listeners to foreign radio artists. Many of the world's best practitioners were distributed in this country for the first time by NAR. The series also commissioned audio essays by editors of important international radio art departments, such as the ABC Australia's "The Listening Room" and ORF Austria's "Radiokunst/Kunstradio." Today, taken together, the brief introductions constitute the beginning of an expressive, accessible and analytical primer on radio art-making in America. |