The Quilts Of Gee’s Bend

Gee’s Bend, Alabama, was so isolated for so long that its only road out of town wasn’t paved until 1967. But the women of the little African-American hamlet have a tradition of creating such extraordinary quilts from whatever materials were available that a show of their work, from the 1930s to 1970s, was recently a runaway hit at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Houston, and then at the Whitney Museum, in New York City. Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts (Tinwood Books, 432 pages, $75) is a big, heavy, sumptuous presentation of more than 300 of the dazzling abstractions, with profiles of the women who created them.