Sewn with love - and sweat

On a bend in the Alabama River, where it veers so sharply as to practically turn in on itself, an extraordinary community grew up. From the women of this rural area - who were descendants of slaves - came a type of quiltmaking that is now heralded as an indigenous art form on a par with jazz.

The contemporary art world has been blindsided by the remarkable quilts of Gee's Bend, which are in their second year of touring major museums in the United States and are currently on display at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The quilts, with their exuberance and bold geometry, call to mind Matisse's cutouts or Mondrian's grids, although the women's designs come from their imaginations and in response to the quilts around them, not from books on art.

Their isolation, as well as a quirk of history, kept Gee's Bend an unusually cohesive place in the late 19th century. The land provided just enough sustenance so that sharecropping families stayed put. But what has emerged in the past few years is the equivalent of rock stardom for the quilters of Boykin, Ala., the town center of Gee's Bend. Since that day in 1998 when art historian Bill Arnett tracked down the Gee's Bend woman whose quilt had captivated him from a photograph, these women's lives haven't been the same.

And most wouldn't have it any other way. The quilts they originally made to keep their families warm have become a means of recognition and a source of income, although quilt production in Gee's Bend has slowed as the women enter their 70s and 80s, and fewer younger women are taking it up.

Today, 35 to 40 women quilt, with some of the older women piecing together their designs for the tops, to which other seamstresses add the backing. The quilts in the exhibition date from the early 1900s to the present day, with some of the finest examples dating to the '30s, '40s, and '50s.

As befits their celebrity status, the quilters travel by bus to each exhibition opening. They spread enormous goodwill by telling their stories, singing gospel tunes, and giving warm hugs - even to strangers. While they defer to curators to explain the aesthetics, they are thrilled to see their quilts hanging on a museum's walls, and grateful to God for bringing them to this point in their lives. Quilter Nettie Young speaks for many of them when she says these quilts "got many prayers and kindness in them."

In fact, the women of Gee's Bend see a certain justice in these developments: Their parents and grandparents picked cotton, but these quilts made largely of cotton cloth are helping lift residents out of a legacy of slavery.

It's a powerful message, and one that museumgoers absorb. Mr. Arnett is also determined that these quilts - and other examples of African-American art - lift viewers out of old prejudices and assumptions. He wants Americans to acknowledge this art as integral to their nation's cultural heritage rather than ghettoizing it as "black folk art."

Such art "doesn't change with art history, and it doesn't respond to art criticism," he says. That makes the quilts a puzzle to some people in the art world. But visitors respond to these abstract designs because they can relate to quilts, where they might be intimidated by other forms of modern art.

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