Helen Drutt traces a pattern from guest to guest, rearranging, summoning, fretting, surrounding, interrupting. She is in all her disarmingly insecure yet self-possessed raconteuse glory at this Art Alliance opening, overseeing the fruits of her labor.

Her signature elements are all in place. The hat, the abrupt laugh, the angular features, the jaunty air, the expressive eyes behind outrageous glasses, the Breon O'Casey silver cuff bracelets, the bemused recognition by all present that this 78-year-old woman is yet again the one who made it happen.

Many in the art world credit Drutt and the eponymous Center City gallery she ran from 1974 to 2002 with lifting craft out of its hippie-macrame ghetto and into its rightful place, alongside painting and sculpture, in museums, collections, and university classes, by championing artists from all over the world.

She created shows of their works, cultivated buyers for their creations, swapped slides like baseball cards to build audience and community, and promoted reputations.

In 2007, after acquiring her 625-piece collection of jewelry, Peter Marzio, director of the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston, wrote that the collection "forces us . . . to redefine ideas of sculpture, painting, decorative arts."

"How can a necklace be compared to a sculpture?" he asked. "It's heresy. That's the point."

Marzio wrote that Drutt was "a connoisseur, collector, dealer, detective, patron, and visionary," who had "shared her home with these artists, helped them financially when necessary, and encouraged them to forge ahead."

Elisabeth Agro, associate curator of American crafts and decorative art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says Drutt, a "living archive" in the field, "coalesced craft in this city with her presence, her foresight, her interaction" with the artists, promoting them "in a way that had never been done before."

On this February night, Drutt is presiding over a book-signing and an opening reception for an exhibit, "Challenging the Chatelaine!" A chatelaine is a medieval belt that held the keys of the castle, and Drutt has commissioned art that reimagines the ornament, making it a statement of something individual and new. Artists from four continents have contributed to the show, which she has "organized and conceived" with the Designmuseo of Helsinki, Finland.

"Tell Marianne I said it's a wonderful show," ceramic artist Paula Winokur tells Drutt, speaking of Marianne Aav, Designmuseo's director.

It is a faux pas, and Drutt replies with diva bluntness and the self-aggrandizement that irks her critics. "It's my show, not Marianne's," she says, gathering her friend back into the fold.

Like Drutt, the exhibit operates on academic and artistic levels, pedantic and whimsical, inspired and eyebrow-raising. True to form, the artists are grateful and challenged, but maybe also a little exhausted by the task.

Jewelry artist Stanley Lechtzin, a self-described recluse dodging impromptu chatter, says his affection for Drutt is the only reason he is at the opening. "But it really has come to fruition in a really exciting way. . . . One never understands Helen. She's constantly evolving. She seems capable of always coming up with new challenges in her life and for those around her."

"She must be obeyed," jokes jewelry artist Sharon Church. "Who wants to say no to Helen?"

Whirlwind at home

Before such nights can happen - when the momentum gathers like a wave coming to shore - there are many days like the one in January.

Just back from Idaho, where her husband, Peter Stern, has a house, Drutt has returned to her two-rowhouse residence on Rittenhouse Street in Center City, a beautiful compound linked by a courtyard sculpture garden.

Amid the unique artwork and furniture, the books everywhere, the walls choreographed in Barnes-like cacophony, the endearingly out-of-place collection of snow globes and refrigerator magnets, Drutt is trying to unpack her suitcases.

She wears a black ribbed cap and matching black ribbed turtleneck, but such simple coherence is not evident anywhere else. Her nonsequitur world moves to a continual drumbeat of ever-more-involved and simultaneous quests. Traipsing up and down her narrow stairs, she ponders the next project, the latest insult, the definitive existential obsession, the just returning from Vienna, the leaving to lecture in Prague, the slides to organize, the always-remembered birthdays, the just-starting-chemo friend who needs to borrow hats, and all those coincidences of date and numbers that preoccupy her at odd times.

Stern is napping now. In the presence of her violin-playing, 80-year-old husband of about a year, director of the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, N.Y., Drutt grows giddy and girlish. Expected any minute is a friend from England, a University of Pennsylvania architecture professor who, like many, stays with Drutt when in town.