ABOUT
Located on the campus of East Los Angeles College, the Vincent Price Art Museum is the first institutional art space to serve the East Los Angeles area. VPAM is a cultural center that benefits the college and its community by offering significant exhibitions and by providing all of Los Angeles with the resource of a regional showcase.
Vincent Price visits the Gallery in the 1970s.
Beginning in 1951, noted actor and collector, Vincent Price, donated art objects from his personal collection to ELAC, establishing the first “teaching art collection” owned by a community college. In 1957, the Vincent and Mary Grant Price Gallery — as it was then known — was founded. And, even today, ELAC remains one of the few community colleges in the United States with the resource of a major art collection. Over the course of more than sixty years, the gallery space has expanded and the collection has grown to more than 9,000 objects!
Countless exhibitions have been realized here including the recent mid-career survey of Barbara Carrasco; CUT: Makings of Removal group show; solo shows of ELAC alumni Diane Gamboa, Gronk, Kent Twitchell, Meillian Hwang and George Yepes, to name a few; and, significant surveys of masters like Rufino Tamayo, Howard Warshaw, and Raul Anguiano. Our annual juried student art show includes the disciplines of studio art, photography and architecture and is held each spring. In addition to works drawn from VPAM’s own collection, we have collaborated on projects with Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA Museum of Cultural History (now the Fowler Museum), and Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.
Designed by Arquitectonica, VPAM’s future home features a lecture hall, collections vault, and seven galleries.
Undoubtedly, the most significant turning point for the Museum will occur in 2010-2011, when VPAM moves into its brand new facility as the cornerstone of ELAC’s new performing and visual arts center! The new four-storey museum, designed by the firm Arquitectonica, will be located on the corner of Avenida Cesar Chavez and Collegian Avenue. It will feature three floors of gallery spaces for temporary shows and displays of the permanent collection. Our collection will be housed in a custom-designed basement storage area known as the Thomas Silliman Vault, named in honor of the long-serving director and generous benefactor of the Museum.