Frank Hodsoll

The Guilds of the Orange County Performing Arts Center is the 1986 recipient of the Orange County Arts Alliance award for outstanding achievement in supporting the arts. The 4,400-member Guilds--considered the largest such volunteer corps in the county--will be presented with the Meritorious Achievement for the Arts Award today at the alliance's State of the Arts Conference being held at the Doubletree Inn in Orange.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is among the 157 symphony and chamber orchestras and auxiliary organizations that received matching grants totaling more than $9.3 million from the National Endowment for the Arts on Monday. Top awards of $290,000 each were received by the Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic for the 1985-86 season.

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts an advancement grant of up to $75,000. The amount of the grant to the Highland Park foundation will depend on its ability to provide a three-to-one match in non-federal funds in the next three years. The three-year advancement grant program is designed to help emerging arts organizations.

Mrs. Norman Chandler of Los Angeles and 11 other artists and patrons of the arts were selected by President Reagan Wednesday as the first recipients of the National Medal of Arts. Mrs. Chandler, wife of the late publisher of the Los Angeles Times, was recognized as "the major effort" behind the planning and construction of the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles, the White House said in a statement.

The Los Angeles Music Center Opera intends to ask the National Endowment for the Arts to waive its rule requiring opera companies to wait two years before applying for funding. Although the NEA hasn't waived the eligibility rule since the program began in 1978, the opera company will argue that it deserves a waiver because of its size and first-year success.

The $700,000 grant awarded to the Joffrey Ballet by the National Endowment for the Arts this week "came not so much as a surprise but as a real fulfillment of Robert Joffrey's and Gerald Arpino's vision," Penelope Curry, the dance company's executive director, said Friday. "Now we're able to protect that vision." The grant to the New York/Los Angeles ballet company was among 25 "Challenge III" grants totaling $9 million that the endowment awarded nationwide.

Calling film preservation one of the highest priorities of the National Endowment for the Arts, Frank Hodsoll, chairman of the NEA, said this week that success in preserving "the moving image" will depend on the cooperation of the film and television industries. Hodsoll addressed the opening session Monday of the 41st Congress of the International Federation of Film Archives, being held here at the Museum of Modern Art through Friday.

As he prepares to leave office, President Reagan is recommending his first--but slight--budget increase for the arts. Instead of the current $169.1 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Administration on Monday proposed spending $170.1 million for fiscal 1990, beginning in October. The endowment, an independent federal agency, awards matching grants to arts organizations and artists and helps support state and local arts agencies.

Frank Hodsoll, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is stirring up a hornet's nest here with a seemingly simple proposal. He wants to make certain that the American high school graduate is literate in the arts. Citing blue-chip support from such bodies as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Getty Trust, Hodsoll is talking about national objectives to give students "not only general knowledge in basic skills but also some measure of critical judgment or taste" in all of the arts.

The brush fire over computer colorizing of black-and-white films made a cultural leap from the film community to the arts community at large over the weekend when the National Council on the Arts unanimously passed a resolution condemning the process.