‘UNUSUALLY LARGE’ GRANT WON BY NEWPORT MUSEUM

The Newport Harbor Art Museum has been awarded a $300,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, 25% of it contingent upon the museum’s success at raising $900,000 more on its own in the next three years, officials with the federal arts agency announced Tuesday morning.

The grant is one of five awarded to performing and visual arts institutions in Southern California and one of 87 awarded nationally.

Romalyn Tilghman, a regional representative of the NEA, said the grant is “unusually large. Our grants are normally given in the $20,000-to-$80,000 range,” she said, explaining that the grant indicates the NEA’s interest in the “risk-taking spirit” at some of Southern California’s smaller museums.

The Newport was the only arts group in Orange County to apply for an NEA challenge grant this year, Tilghman said.

“We really are very pleased to get this money, and we will use it for exhibitions and education,” said John Martin Shea, a former chairman of the museum’s board of directors, who was standing in at a press conference for the current chairman, Rogue Henley.

Henley is in Paris to interview an architect being considered to design a new $20-million home for the Newport museum, a project Tilghman called an “undeniable factor” in helping the museum secure its grant.

In a prepared statement, Henley said the challenge grant “will be a powerful incentive to us as we embark on our capital campaign to build our new, enlarged museum.”

Jane Piasecki, the museum’s associate director, said that the Newport will use half of the grant to augment the museum’s existing $1.4-million endowment and that the rest will go toward operating cash reserves. She said the museum expects to start receiving 75% of the grant in November. Museum officials said it is too soon to become specific about projects on which the money will be spent.

Piasecki noted that the grant is a relatively substantial infusion of money to the museum, which has a $1.8-million operating budget for the 1987-88 fiscal year that started this month.

This, the museum’s second NEA grant, is twice as large as the one it received in 1978, Newport officials said. Tilghman, noting that the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art received a $250,000 grant this year, spoke at length in an interview about the role of smaller museums.

She said: “With the growth of museums in Los Angeles, the MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) and the (Los Angeles) County Museum, we (at the NEA) are becoming aware of the smaller museums that are able to take risks in their approach to exhibitions.

“We are aware of this museum as that kind of institution and as one that will become more nationally prominent in the next five to 10 years. It is significant that we are giving grants to this type of museum.”

Neither the MOCA or the County Museum won grants this year because both got them too recently to be eligible to apply again.