Art Rides the Airwaves (Video)

R. Lee Montgomery

R. Lee Mont­gomery is inter­ested in “new ways for peo­ple to look at the medium of radio and what it is to use wire­less tech­nolo­gies to com­mu­ni­cate,” he said. “It’s really about think­ing of alter­nate plat­forms for pre­sent­ing work, aside from just the gallery or the museum.”

Mont­gomery joined UNM a year and a half ago as assis­tant pro­fes­sor of elec­tronic arts, Depart­ment of Art & Art His­tory. He teaches Inter­me­di­ate Elec­tronic Art and Com­puter Art – Broadcast.

He has a Bach­e­lor of Arts from Bard Col­lege and Mas­ter of Fine Arts from San Fran­cisco Art Insti­tute. Before com­ing to UNM, he taught at Dia­blo Val­ley Col­lege and Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Santa Cruz.

Mont­gomery started out as a film­maker. His video piece “Trans­formed 02: I Am Sit­ting in a The­ater” is show­ing out­side the UNM Art Museum at the Cen­ter for the Arts. He worked as an edi­tor for doc­u­men­taries, com­mer­cials and video games and as a Web designer.

“It’s all been a nat­ural pro­gres­sion from think­ing of myself as a film­maker to think­ing of myself as more of an artist that deals with con­cepts and finds the tech­nolo­gies – which could range from graphite on paper to a large jum­botron at the foot­ball stadium.”

Montgomery’s broad­cast course immerses stu­dents in both the tech­ni­cal and con­cep­tual sides of the medium. “We spend a lot of time with sol­der­ing irons mak­ing cir­cuits for exper­i­men­tal instal­la­tions and lis­ten­ing to sound art, and then we also spend some time talk­ing about how you pro­duce more tra­di­tional radio pro­gram­ming,” he said.

Mont­gomery is a founder, direc­tor and pro­ducer of Neigh­bor­hood Pub­lic Radio, which started in Oak­land in 2004 as a par­ody of National Pub­lic Radio. “It is very hard to encap­su­late what a Neigh­bor­hood Pub­lic Radio broadcast/installation/performance is or can be, because it’s always some­thing dif­fer­ent and it’s always a sur­prise,” he said.

Neigh­bor­hood Pub­lic Radio has three events com­ing up at the Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art, Los Ange­les, designed around three ways peo­ple lis­ten to radio: on head­phones, in the car and “in the air.” Stu­dents from Montgomery’s broad­cast class and a class taught by Steve Barry and Mary Tsion­gas will be part of the exhibition.

“It’ll be a unique chance for UNM under­grad­u­ate stu­dents and grad­u­ate stu­dents to come to L.A. and be a part of a museum show, meet the cura­tor and see what it is to really put on a show at a museum. I know when I was an under­grad, I had no sense of what that meant. So I feel really very priv­i­leged to be able to do it myself, but also to include my stu­dents in the process.”