For a long time the quilts hung in the domestic-arts tent at the county fair, judged alongside pies and pickles, admired and then folded away. A shift in how the work is seen has begun to move it somewhere else: onto gallery walls, where the quilts are lit and framed and discussed in the language usually reserved for painting.

The quilters themselves are ambivalent about the change. Most learned the craft as a practical skill, a way to keep a family warm, and the idea of a quilt as art can sit uneasily with that history. But few object to the recognition, or to the prices that gallery walls can command.

The designs, often improvised and geometrically bold, have drawn comparisons to modernist abstraction, comparisons the makers find both flattering and slightly beside the point. "I wasn't thinking about any painter," one quilter said. "I was thinking about what I had in the scrap bag."

That combination of necessity and invention is exactly what admirers respond to. The quilts carry the fingerprints of the lives that made them, and no gallery framing can quite domesticate that. They remain, first, objects of use, and only second, and almost by accident, art.