Sew important The glory of ‘The Quilts of Gee’s Bend’ BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"The Quilts of Gee’s Bend" At the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue in Boston, through August 21.

The Museum of Fine Arts’ show of 65 quilts by slave-descendant women from a remote and isolated hamlet in southwestern Alabama (population about 700) stands to earn the enthusiasm of pretty much everybody lucky enough to see it. Lavish colors, idiosyncratic designs, varied textures, and a level of compositional wit and integrity I associate with the buildings of Frank Gehry and the paintings of Paul Klee make "The Quilts of Gee’s Bend" a phenomenon. One after another, these typically seven-foot-square creations whose needlework spans almost a century loom like jazz panoramas: encompassing and vast, crazily melodic, alternately contemplative and ecstatic. It’s hard to walk away with only a catalogue.

Since 2002, the show has hopscotched the US, stopping at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia; it will conclude its run at the High Museum in Atlanta. Yet here in Boston, it arrived without the fanfare that accompanied the MFA’s "Speed, Style and Beauty." It’s sobering to reflect that only now might the artisans of Gee’s Bend be able to afford the kind of evening wear suitable for the opening reception of one of their shows. And that these creations came into being as a legacy of impoverishment, racism, and calculated isolation — the ferry that used to cross the Alabama River between Gee’s Bend and Camden was terminated in the 1960s to help minimize voter registration.

Maybe what’s most troubling is how gigantic the quilts are, and I don’t mean just their physical size. They’re the equivalent of a Mahler symphony penned in a concentration camp: spirited, iconoclastic, often æthereal forms that don’t just refuse to acknowledge the destitution of their genesis (even those made from worn work clothes look angelic) but celebrate the life of the mind. It’s hard enough to locate the wellsprings of beauty in what Yeats called the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart"; it’s harder still to embrace the idea that out of the cruelties America has profited by a redemptive art is born. And though the essays of the "Gee’s Bend" catalogue provide a wealth of history and theory in lucid prose, you can count on one hand the sentences that deal with the quilts themselves — their astute designs, their musicality, their uncanny ability to embody irresolution, their peculiar integration of the gentle with the edgy, the improvisational with the planned. Seldom has an exhibit had so much to offer while leaving its offerings so unarticulated.

One theme here is exaltation, the almost explosive unfolding of patterns and color that suggest a charged belonging to the universe. In Ella Mae Irby’s 1973 Texas Star, a central, eight-point red star appears to emanate light, a throbbing presence surrounded by an alternating pattern of red and white parallelograms that grow thinner and more luminous as they beam outward toward the edges of the quilt. Such configurations are a typical quilt motif, but what Irby does with the form is ingenious. As the star expands into an overall eight-point shape, the reds change into earthy browns, as if the star were reaching to and becoming terra firma. And then, as if to reinforce the idea that heaven and earth are always conjoined, the brown tentacles of the now giant star touch on a dense flower design, huge orchid-like blossoms on a deep purple background. Not only does the star touch earth, it feeds it.

Exaltation can take many forms, and though none of the other quilts moves so pointedly and energetically outward, there’s a pulsating energy in Essie Bendolph Pettway’s 1956 Pinwheel. Reminiscent of a tidal pool for its multiple shades of greens and blues against an undulating floral pattern, the quilt’s six pinwheels combine with the fragmentary triangles that surround them to suggest comets skipping across a watery sky.

The variations on traditional quilting vocabulary are sufficiently extreme to justify the curators’ conviction that the Gee’s Bend quilters represent a class apart. Lucy T. Pettway’s 1981 Birds in the Air conveys the formality of a grid and the excitement of migration. By sizing seven triangles to be larger than all the rest and arranging those seven on a diagonal from upper left to lower right while manipulating the color scheme to create ripples in multiple directions, Pettway creates a composition both static and ecstatic, cerebral and physical.

Nettie Young’s 1971 H is an even more radical tussle with the grid; the result suggests Piet Mondrian. Sometimes bifurcated, sometimes not, black and white circles appear against a network of white and black squares on a red field. Everything’s orderly yet nothing’s quite symmetrical; no sooner do you detect a pattern than it seems sidetracked, interrupted. All the circular forms are black or white except one, and that red exception is small and off center, a trumpet in a Bach cantata. The quilt’s four brown borders frame the geometric goings-on at the center except for two moments that erupt in bright beige. And it’s only when you notice these thematic variations (or outright contradictions) that you realize they all occur in the same quadrant of the quilt. Here playfulness and innovation aren’t just ideas, they’re a place.

Annie Mae Young’s quilts are marked by two distinct qualities. She works exclusively in cotton strips: "I never did like book patterns some people had. Those things had too many little bitty blocks." And she tears rather than cuts them: "It always came out level." One of the subtlest and most meditative pieces in the show is her rectangular quilt (circa 1975) of interlocking thin corduroy lengths. Sixteen mustard-colored strips and six red ones randomly occupy horizontal stretches in the upper-left and lower-right quadrants. The 22 colored lengths of cloth appear against a background of uniform interlocking rich brown corduroy. Up close, the piece resembles a slow cascade or soft clapboards; it made me think of the perfectly terraced hills of Tuscany. At the quilt’s center, one of the red strips on the left meets with its match on the right, creating the only line that extends horizontally across the whole. Even randomness ultimately grows into order.