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Neighborhood Public Radio is a project led by Lee Montgomery, Linda Arnejo, Michael Trigilio, and Jon Brumit that creates short-term microbroadcasting stations in communities and supports community and artist-created content for broadcast. The project’s name, acronym, and even logo are intended as critiques of National Public Radio, making the argument that truly non-commercial and community-based programming can be more powerful and meaningful to people than corporate-sponsored “public” content. In a 2005 interview with Punk Planet, founder Lee Montgomery admitted, “on a certain level, what we are trying to emulate is what National Public Radio used to be,” contrasting coverage of Vietnam War protests by National Public Radio in the 1970s in which reporters immersed in the protests letting the people around them tell their stories, to contemporary coverage of global protests against the Iraq War consisting of brief reports from journalists in different sites reporting from “above the crowd” and little more than estimates of numbers of people. The Neighborhood Public Radio project has riffed on other National Public Radio themes, producing a crowdsourced show called “American Life” that included broadcasts from Portable Radio Instruments (PRI), a riff on distributor Public Radio International and its popular show This American Life.

Since its founding in 2004, Neighborhood Public Radio installations have taken place in galleries, museums, art festivals, and store fronts in a wide array of cities including San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago, and Hamburg, and were included as part of the Whitney Biennial in 2008. Installations often include partnerships with local community organizations and artists to create programming, workshops on creating transmitters and other electronic instruments, performances, and interactive broadcasting events that invite the community to be part of the station’s content.

Over the course of the 2004 installation at Southern Exposure Gallery in San Francisco, artist Michael Trigilio as his alter-ego, a vitriolic “common sense” political commentator, Michael Starve, hosted episodes of a call-in political talk show called “The Starve Zone.” Topics included welfare, religion, poverty, homelessness, and the upcoming election between John Kerry and George W. Bush, including an episode in which he offered live commentary on a presidential debate. In this episode, Starve engages with callers about the lingering effects of war on individuals, societies, and political dealings, and rants about the stultifying effects of mainstream media, including National Public Radio and trivialities presented as front-page news. - Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2020/2021, Jess Speer.