A costume party with a photobooth, food, drink, and a rare look at Vincent Price's personal archives takes over the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park this Friday, October 23. The event, called Museum on Haunted Hill: A Celebration of Vincent Price, doubles as a fundraiser for a museum built from the actor's own 1957 gift of artwork to East Los Angeles College.
As reported by NBC Los Angeles, tickets run $50, with museum members getting in free, and the celebration includes a costume party, a photobooth, food and drink, and access to the museum's current exhibitions. Museum staff told the outlet that ticket purchases directly support preservation and expansion of the collection and help keep the museum a free educational resource for the community. The event takes its name from Price's 1958 film House on Haunted Hill, in which his character famously promised, “there will be food and drink and ghosts, and perhaps even a few murders.”
Attendees willing to brave the one-night-only special collections display will get a glimpse of personal archives and paper ephemera belonging to Price that are rarely shown publicly, according to the Vincent Price Art Museum. It's a fitting bonus for an institution named after an actor most people associate with campy horror classics like House of Wax and The Abominable Dr. Phibes, but who was, by most measures, a serious art scholar.
A Yale Art Historian Who Sold Masterworks at Sears
Before his screen career took off, Price earned a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and English from Yale University in 1933 and went on to study fine art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, according to YaleNews. That scholarly background fed into an unusual chapter of American retail history: from 1962 to 1971, Price worked as an art curator and spokesman for Sears, Roebuck & Co., selecting and selling more than 50,000 original masterworks and prints through retail stores and catalogs, per Artists Network. The goal, according to the same account, was to make fine art accessible to average American households rather than keep it locked away for the wealthy.
That same populist streak carried over to his civic work. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis appointed Price to the White House Commission of Fine Arts, while he also served on the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. His first appointment to the board was in 1957, and Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall later reappointed him, according to the Vincent Price Art Museum Blog. Price brought expertise in Native American and pre-Columbian art to this civic work. It's a side of the horror icon that rarely makes it into retrospectives built around his roles in films now pushing 70 years old.
From 90 Gifted Artworks to a 9,000-Piece Collection
Price's 1957 donation of dozens of artworks to East Los Angeles College, noted by NBC Los Angeles, seeded what has since grown into a permanent collection of approximately 9,000 artworks, according to the California Arts Council. The museum itself occupies a 40,000-square-foot, three-story building on the East Los Angeles College campus, with seven exhibition galleries, a multimedia lecture hall, and a professional art storage vault, per the same source.
The museum serves students and communities of East L.A. College and beyond, featuring exhibitions that highlight historically underrepresented artists from East Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley, according to NBC Los Angeles. That mission carries particular weight given its location: the California Arts Council notes the museum serves an East Los Angeles-area population that is 96% Latinx, making it one of the few community college-based art museums in the country to maintain a permanent collection of this scale.
Student Internships and a Buddhist Bug Currently on Display
Beyond the Halloween party, the museum's Museum Studies Certificate Program connects to paid local student internships in curatorial work, collections management, and museum administration, according to the California Arts Council. The VPAM Foundation is a fundraising organization, per the Vincent Price Art Museum Foundation.
Guests touring the galleries Friday will also see Anida Yoeu Ali: The Buddhist Bug, a solo show featuring a 328-foot-long performance sculpture that opened in September and runs through May 2027, funded by a grant from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. It's a striking pairing for a night built around a horror star's legacy: a campy costume party upstairs from a serious, internationally funded contemporary art installation, all traceable back to one actor's decision nearly seventy years ago to give his art collection to a community college.
