Our Mission
Museo Eduardo Carrillo is dedicated to continuing the compassionate legacy and ideals of Chiano artist Eduardo Carrillo through the display of his art and through the support of the Chicanè community in the arts.
Our History
Museo Eduardo Carrillo was founded in 2001 to extend the artist’s work and compassionate legacy into the world. Through exhibitions, web presence and publications viewers can become acquainted with the richness of the artist’s vision.
Read the full story of Museo Eduardo Carrillo’s origin as told by founder Alison Carrillo.
Meet the Team
Nicole Rudolph-Vallerga
Director
Nicole Rudolph-Vallerga was born and raised in California and cares deeply about the Chicané/Latiné community. As a biracial Latina she witnessed firsthand the stark difference in how her mother’s side of the family was treated versus her father’s side and has dedicated her life to the advocation of the Chicané/Latiné community. This is not only realized through her work as Director, but also as an artist and curator. Nicole’s works are often specifically focused on multiracial and multicultural identity as it appears within art and visual culture. In her recent presentation at the Art Institute of Chicago she discussed the ways that early racialized imagery of minority people continue to affect views and depictions of minorities today, and the importance of artists who have been confronting these stereotyped images directly within their work. Nicole graduated with highest honors from UCSC and holds a BA in Art (Practice) & History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) with a concentration in Curation and Cultural Heritage
Alison Carrillo
Founder and Board President
Alison Keeler Carrillo is the founder of Museo Eduardo Carrillo. While she considers herself first and foremost a mother and homemaker, she is also an avid knitter, gardener, musician, cook, swimmer, devotee, a student of politics and history, and a writer whose focus is on Eduardo and the life that they shared together. She has published writing in “The Widow’s Handbook” and is an occasional public speaker. Upon Eduardo’s passing, Alison created the UCSC Eduardo Carrillo Scholarship where funds are given to art students in need. The idea of Museo came to her in a dream from which she awoke with the realization that her husband had left her with a job for which he had neither time nor inclination: legacy work. And so, in 2001, Museo Eduardo Carrillo was born with a mission to promote Eduardo’s legacy, his artwork and his teaching both of which naturally flow toward Chicano artists and the Chicano community.
In Memoriam
Betsy Andersen
Founding Executive Director
Betsy Andersen, our beloved friend and colleague, was a profoundly active member of the arts community and became the first director of Museo Eduardo Carrillo in 2003, co-founding the first and only Artist Endowed Foundation in the United States devoted to the work of a Mexican American Artist. A former student and friend of Eduardo Carrillo, Betsy was committed to the mission of furthering Eduardo’s legacy through multiple projects such as the Califas Legacy Project. Through Betsy, Museo partnered with Julia Chiapella and the Young Writer’s Program, creating curriculum that exposes contemporary Chicano art to middle school students as inspiration to create their own personal narratives. Betsy is dearly missed but is still with us through her life’s work and Museo’s ongoing mission.
Jennifer González
Board Member
Jennifer González writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation, digital and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space (exhibition space, public space, virtual space) by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender. González has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She has published articles in numerous scholarly and art publications such as Journal of Visual Culture, Frieze, Bomb, Diacritics, Archives of American Art Journal, Camera Obscura, Open Space and Art Journal. Her second book, Pepon Osorio, received an International Latino Book Award. She served as chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology which was listed among the best art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020. González also writes numerous exhibition catalog essays, most recently for the exhibitions Diego Rivera’s America (2022), Amalia Mesa Bains: Archeology of Memory (2023), and Isaac Julien: I Dream a World (2025). She has lectured extensively at universities and art museums nationally and internationally and teaches regularly at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York.
Beth Stephens
Board Member
Beth Stephens is a performance artist and filmmaker with a Ph.D. in Performance Studies. She grew up in rural Appalachia, which inspired her environmental justice ethos and has had a lasting influence on her work. After making visual and performance art about identity during the nineties culture wars, Stephens left New York for a professorship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she currently teaches. Stephens has directed and produced a trilogy of experimental environmental documentaries: Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2014), Water Makes Us Wet (2017), and Playing with Fire (2025). She founded the non-profit, E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF (Environmental Art, Research, Theory, and Happenings). Her book, co-authored with Sprinkle (University of Minnesota Press), is Assuming the Ecosexual Position: Earth as Lover. Stephens is a Guggenheim Fellow and a documenta 14 artist. Her work has also been supported by the Rydell Fellowship, the Eureka Fellowship, the Arts Research Institute at UC Santa Cruz, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and the California Arts Commission.