ARCHIVE

This week, tune in a new radio work from Tyler Maxin, and an older piece from Rhodessa Jones and Idris Ackamoor. First, as a 2023 Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow, Maxin was commissioned to create a radio work, and he made, "Untitled (the melody was pursy as it tore into this heart of mine)." Here, that work is featured, along with an interview about it by radio artist Gregory Whitehead. Then tune in "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women, a work from 1993 by Rhodessa Jones and Idris Ackamoor Based on the powerful one-woman performance Jones toured in 1991-92. The story follows the real-life adventures and misadventures of an artist hired by the California Arts Council to teach "aerobics" in San Francisco's city jail. While teaching there she meets and hears the horrifying, dangerous, and sometimes profoundly touching stories of the incarcerated women. Jones' portrayal is an intense and moving tour-de-force. It was commissioned by New American Radio.

Welcome to "The Radio Art Hour," a show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio. "The Radio Art Hour" draws from the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource that aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks made by artists around the world, created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or independent transmission. Come on a journey with us as radio artists explore broadcast radio space through poetic resuscitations and playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers in this hour of radio about radio as an art form. "The Radio Art Hour" features introductions from Philip Grant and Tom Roe, and from Wave Farm Radio Art Fellows Karen Werner, Jess Speer, and Andy Stuhl. The Conet Project's recordings of numbers radio stations serve as interstitial sounds. Go to wavefarm.org for more information about "The Radio Art Hour" and Wave Farm's Radio Art Archive.