Gertrud Valerie Parker

December 7, 1924 - January 10, 2021

Gertrud Parker, artist, collector and founder of the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, died peacefully at her home in Tiburon on January 10, 2021 at the age of 96.

A native of Vienna, Austria, Gertrud was 13 in 1938 when she watched the Nazis march into the city from her bedroom window. She and her parents fled, catching the last train out of the country before the borders were closed, leaving behind their home, its furnishings and the family dog.

Gertrud’s maternal grandfather, Karl Pick, was an elected representative in the Austrian Parliament who founded a labor union for office workers. A street in Vienna is named for him. Her father was the Director of the Worker’s Bank in Vienna until his arrest and political imprisonment during the fascist uprising of 1934.

The family immigrated to France, then New York, before finally settling in San Francisco’s Forest Hill neighborhood, because it resembled their district in Vienna. Gertrud and her husband, attorney and real estate investor Harold Parker, subsequently built a house in Tiburon, where she lived for almost 50 years.

In San Francisco, Gertrud graduated from Washington High School at the age of 16, and received a Bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley at the age of 19. Given her limited English, she had always felt that the schools were more interested in moving war refugees quickly through the system rather than educating them. In 1982, Gertrud founded the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum, which started out in a private house near Golden Gate Park before moving to Fort Mason Center. In 2000, the museum relocated to Yerba Buena Lane and changed its name to the Museum of Craft and Folk Art. It closed in 2012 after a 30-year run.

Gertrud’s own artwork is included in the permanent collections of the Oakland Museum and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She was deeply involved in the Bay Area fiber arts movement and drew inspiration from the weaving and fiber arts of various cultures.

In the catalogue for “Gertrud Parker: Artist and Collector” at the Sonoma County Museum, scholar Amy Winter writes: “In the 1970s, Parker’s art followed the pattern of other women artists of her generation – tentatively at first, taking a backseat to her role as a wife and mother, but engendered by that very constraint as she applied skills she had honed from her beginnings: sewing, designing, weaving and embroidery, which comfortably fit her domestic life. This period saw not only the social liberation of women by the feminist movement, but a revision of modernist theory and practice that defied the patronizing categories of “high” and “low” art that marginalized any medium outside of painting and sculpture.”

In his notes for Gertrud’s Sonoma County Museum show, Peter Selz, former curator of painting and sculpture at MOMA in New York and founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum, writes: “Inspired by the traditional Alaskan material, Parker began working with gutskin in the late 1980s. Gutskin is a material that appears to be fragile, but it is actually highly resistant - gutsy. Parker’s inclination toward unusual materials brought her to make a sculpture of dyed skin and colored feathers from a male duck. The piece is an enigmatic, surreal work, called “Blue Markings”. It was one of three American entries in the Toyamura International Sculpture Biennale of 1999.”

Gertrud’s choice to make art from gutskin (cow intestines) says a lot about her. She was unconventional, and had a sense of humor. Even into her 80s, Gertrud would strap on her welding helmet to construct steel armatures to which she attached strips of dyed gut. Her medium eventually shifted to encaustic painting. Gertrud continued to hike up the hill to her studio to make art until the very end. She was an artistic inspiration to many, as well as a source of sage advice. Gertrud was predeceased by her husband of 57 years, Harold Parker. She is survived by her daughter, Diana Rogers (James), her sons, David Parker (Christiane) and Jonathan Parker (Deborah), her stepson, Rod Parker, her grandchildren, Andy Green (Emily Gee), Gabrielle Feuersinger (Hans), Sebastian Parker (Celine), Jacob Rogers (Hannah Cummons), Sam Parker (Madeline Hollander), Olivia Parker (Jameel Merali), and six great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held via Zoom on Sunday, January 31, 2021. For more information, please email: info@parkerfilmcompany. com.