Nettie Young's "H" variation ("Milky Way"), 1971. Photo by Steve Pitkin/Pitkin Studio

Most wonderful about this show is the vitality exuded by the 60-odd quilts dating from the 1930s to the 1990s. They all but leap off the walls. The 41 women who made them were and are descendents of slaves, living in the tiny, isolated rural community of Gee's Bend, Ala. (population about 700). These four generations of women, poor as they were, possessed a high degree of pride and independence. A 20-minute video includes interviews with some of the women and shows how, after backbreaking workaday activities, they would get together to sing and sew their quilts.

Many of the quilts are based on traditional patterns, but these makers refused to be boxed in. They shout out their sassy eccentricities, often throwing in an irreverent stitch or a wayward splash of color. Like jazz itself, the quilts arise from a convention but then improvisation takes over, as each woman varies the pattern in her own quilt. The result is an astonishing array of form, color, and texture. The sources range from "Housetop" patterns (based on what are usually called "Half-Log Cabins") and "Lazy Gal" (or "Bars") patterns of blocks, strips, and bars, to triangles arranged in "Flying Geese" or "Thousand Pyramids" patterns, as well as totally unique, individual compositions.

As jazz takes its starting point from African music, so do these quilts refer back to African textiles, especially from the Kuba people in Central Africa and Kente cloths of the Asante in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. As jazz incorporates American tunes and blues, the quilters combine African sources with traditional American ones. As black musicians often fashioned drums, percussion, and wind instruments out of everyday items like pieces of old furniture, barrels, glasses, and the like, so these women made use of fabrics of everyday life such as old work clothes, faded dresses, handkerchiefs, cotton sheets, mattress covering, pieces of denim, and corduroy. In both cases, the results are exuberant, rambunctious, unorthodox admixtures of pleasure and pain.

Indeed, Michael Kimmelman, in The New York Times, uses many jazz terms to describe the quilts and their makers. He refers to "syncopation," which breaks regular rhythm in some of the quilt patterns, to a "riff," which also goes off on a tandem from the main theme; and to "call and response" as the method by which the quilt makers handed down ideas in families, as well as borrowing and improvising on themes they saw in each others' quilts on clotheslines.

Annie E. Pettway's "Flying Geese" variation, c. 1935. Photo by Steve Pitkin/Pitkin Studio

Annie E. Pettway's "Flying Geese" variation, made about 1935, consists of squiggly lines of triangular "geese" within red-outlined, unequal boxes. Inexplicably, one of the boxes is almost completely blue (all the rest are red, white, blue, and gray) and the outlines are ragged and jauntily uneven.

Lottie Mooney's "Housetop"—a four-block "Half-Log Cabin" variation of about 1940, looks at first almost symmetrical, like a double, inverted candelabra. But upon closer inspection, it is not at all uniform; the parts do not quite line up; its borders are wavy and off-kilter. The bright orange background overflows its black border to compensate for its low placement.

Nettie Young's "H" variation (quiltmaker's name: "Milky Way"), made in 1971, looks almost like Op Art. In fact, one is hard-pressed not to think of the work of Victor Vassarelly. Completely offbeat and eye-popping, it bounces around with small geometric forms enclosed in unequal black, white, and gray rectangles against a bright red ground. Again, the border careens around, mostly black, but with two inexplicable squibs of gray.

Perhaps the most stirring quilts are those composed of pieces of denim and old work clothes, the only property left to the women by their impoverished husbands. So they incorporated these into memories, wrapping themselves in them to dream, to obtain some comfort.

Lottie Mooney's "Housetop," c. 1940. Courtesy Tinwood Books. Photo by Steve Pitkin/Pitkin Studio

Like jazz and blues musicians, the quilt makers of Gee's Bend possess the ability to convert pain and sadness into healing and joy. The bittersweet qualities of both are abundantly apparent in their separate art forms.

It is not coincidental that the quilts also recall the collages of the great African-American artist Romare Bearden. Like the quilt makers, Bearden wove together fragments of African-American culture; also like them, music inspired his work throughout his lifetime. In fact, Wynton Marsalis made a film about Bearden and jazz, which can be purchased at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is in the Juilliard library's collection.

This inspirational, poetic, musical, modern exhibition will be at the Whitney Museum of American Art through March 2. The Whitney is located at 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street. It is open Tuesday-Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and on Friday from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.. The museum is closed on Monday.

Art historian Greta Berman has been on the liberal arts faculty since 1979.