Sam Whiting January 21, 2021Updated: January 24, 2021, 11:53 am
Gertrud Parker at the 2006 Museum of Craft and Folk Art gala in San Francisco. Photo: Parker family
The San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum opened in 1982 in a small Richmond District home owned by its founder Gertrud Parker — a fiber artist with a belief that ceramics and wood carvings were as legitimate a form as fine art painting.
Parker had no fear of failure, or anything else. As a teenager, she’d narrowly escaped the Nazis by train out of her native Vienna. She trusted her hunch about folk art and she was right. Her museum outgrew the house and moved to Fort Mason before landing downtown as the renamed Museum of Craft and Folk Art. Its opening nights were packed up until its closing night, in October 2012 after a 30-year run at up to 60,000 visitors per annum.