Controllable liquid crystal (LC) defects can provide an effective approach to creating tunable optical vortices. We develop a method to create tunable matter vortex arrays in an LC cell, in which +1 and -1 defects are periodically arranged in a square grid lattice. Spontaneous formation of the periodic defect array is achieved using a spontaneous standing pressure wave without using any patterned electrode or patterned alignment layer. The +1 and -1 defects in the array can induce optical vortices with opposite handedness, and the matter vortex array produces a periodic optical vortex array with orbital angular momenta of -2h and +2h in the same grid lattice. Because the pitch of the grid can be controlled, the method can provide a useful pathway to producing tunable optical vortex arrays for various applications such as advanced optical communication and quantum computation.