If truth be told, Ed Jordan has no idea how many pieces of Mexican folk art he has in his collection.

Jordan lent more than 150 pieces to Mexic-Arte Museum for an exhibit in 2010. But thousands and thousands of masks, ceramic statuary, decorative plates, vases and other objects fill Jordan’s West Austin home, the products of more than four decades of collecting.

Jordan is just one of several folk art collectors in town who suggest it’s time to start talking seriously about the idea of establishing a folk art museum in Austin.

“Something has to be done,” the 79-year-old says. “A lot of us are getting older and don’t have families interested in inheriting our collections. Where is all this art going to go? Who’s going to care for it and share it? Let’s get together and talk.”

The talking starts Friday with a public discussion featuring a panel of museum and folk art experts. The event takes place at St. Edward’s University, and admission is free. (See information box.)

The discussion is sponsored by the Austin Friends of Folk Art, a small nonprofit organization made up of collectors, artists and folk art enthusiasts. Started in 1988, the group has never operated a facility and instead raises money to give grants to other organizations.

For years, AFFA has given money to Mexic-Arte for its Día de los Muertos activities. The group has donated funds to Esquina Tango’s youth dance program in East Austin, to the Puerto Rican Folkloric Cultural Center and to the Indigenous Cultures Institute in San Marcos.

Merry Wheaton, current president of AFFA, conceded that given the still recessionary economic landscape, the timing might not be perfect to present the idea of building a new museum.

However, Wheaton offers, perhaps a dedicated brick-and-mortar destination is not the place to start.

“Clearly there are a lot of (folk art) collections in town that will need to be housed and taken care of,” she says. “We’re an all-volunteer organization, and we don’t have an endowment or maybe even the people who could lead the fundraising for a new building. But maybe we don’t need a building.”

What if, Wheaton suggests, for starters there’s a folk art museum without walls that stages exhibits in existing cultural facilities. “Hotel lobbies, the airport — any place people already gather,” Wheaton says, echoing some current museum trends that emphasize collaborative efforts. “Art is already exhibited in such places.”

And with AFFA’s longtime support of folk art performance, foodways, music, dance and other cultural traditions, maybe visual art — art objects — needn’t be the sole focus of a museum effort.

“There are lots of possibilities,” she says. “What we want is to put ideas out there, see what the community desires and see who else is out there and interested. If there’s energy out there for something, we can move forward.”

Folk art has always been something of the forgotten stepchild within the art world.

Usually affordable, accessible to collectors of modest means and easily obtainable to those willing to travel, folk art doesn’t offer the exclusive insiderness that attracts the rich — and especially the aspirationally new rich — to contemporary art or blue chip masterpieces.

Museums dedicated to folk art are rare and usually much smaller than most encyclopedic art museums. They are also considerably less funded. Last year, the American Museum of Folk Art in New York garnered headlines when it sold its architecturally spiffy new $32 million building to the Museum of Modern Art next door, unable to pay for or operate the larger facility. (The folk art museum retreated to its previous smaller digs.)

Few art museums include folk art in their collections. Quite exceptionally, the San Antonio Museum of Art has a gallery dedicated to Latin American folk art, part of the museum’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Latin American Art. Not surprising then that Marion Oettinger, the museum’s curator of Latin American Art, is one of the featured speakers at Friday’s talk.

Oettinger will be joined by folk art collector Lance Aaron, entrepreneur Gary Hoover, museum planning consultant Sherry Kafka Wagner and Ned Rifkin, former Blanton Museum of Art director and currently an art history professor at the University of Texas.

Friday’s talk will be recorded and a transcript created, Wheaton said. And AFFA leaders will meet in February to review and evaluate what the discussion turns up before deciding how to move forward.

Wheaton suggests that with our increasingly global marketplace and political landscape, understanding different cultures is more urgent than ever, hence the need for the greater appreciation of folk art.

“We’re curious about other cultures, all cultures, and all aspects of other cultures,” she says of AFFA. “We have a lot of curiosity, and we have plenty to share.”