NEA to Award $14.5 Million to Arts Organizations : Funding: Matching grants include $1.5 million earmarked for Southern California institutions.

The National Endowment for the Arts will award $14.5 million in federal matching grants to arts organizations for 1993--including $1.5 million earmarked for seven Southern California arts institutions.

The seven grantees are Los Angeles’ Music Center Opera Assn., which will receive $470,000; American Film Institute ($350,000); Los Angeles Philharmonic ($175,000); the Los Angeles Festival ($125,000); Santa Monica’s Cornerstone Theater Company (210,000); the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego ($210,000); and Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory ($115,000).

The list of California recipients also includes the American Conservatory Theater ($235,000) and the Women’s Philharmonic ($75,000), both of San Francisco, boosting the total funding for California groups to $1.88 million.

The funding is awarded through the NEA’s Challenge Grant program, which requires the grantees to raise a minimum of three private dollars for every dollar awarded by the NEA, over a three-year period. The grant program will fund 60 cultural organizations in 22 states, selected from an applicant pool of 268 groups nationwide.

This year’s grants range from $1 million down to $75,000. The largest grant goes to the Atlanta Arts Alliance’s Woodruff Arts Center, to assist the center’s multimillion-dollar fund drive to benefit its Alliance Theater.

The American Film Institute grant will support a new $1.5-million film preservation project honoring the 100th anniversary of cinema, among other AFI projects. The Los Angeles Festival will divide its funds between its upcoming August-October festival celebrating the arts of the Middle East and Africa, and the development of programs exploring the roots of dance and music forms of particular interest to teen-age audiences, including rap and hip-hop, because the young audience has traditionally been underserved by arts programs.

Santa Monica’s Cornerstone Theater plans to produce three theater pieces over a period of three years, resulting from three multi-week residencies. “Bridge Productions” will devote its first residency to senior citizens, Arab-Americans and Latinos; the second will focus on Korean- and African-Americans. The third residency will result in an original three-act play “focusing on the interconnection of living and working environments.”

South Coast Repertory plans to establish an endowment for its Nexus Program, which will support commissions from minority and alternative theater artists.

The $75,000 grant to San Francisco’s Women’s Philharmonic will help to commission works by women composers. The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, will use its grant toward a projected renovation of its La Jolla facility designed by architect Robert Venturi.

The Los Angeles Opera, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) will use their grants for such needs as on-going support, purchases of new equipment and building renovation. ACT’s main focus will be restoring its theater following extensive earthquake damage in 1989.