The 16 women, sitting in a semicircle, look like they should be at a church function.

All gussied up and well past “a certain age,” they break out into a toe-tapping chorus of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” at the slightest provocation. Yet, despite their humble appearances, their quilts are coveted worldwide as high art.

These Southern women created some of the pieces displayed in “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” a traveling exhibition that just opened for a four-month run at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale.

The exhibit –– featuring 63 quilts sewn by 46 quilters from the tiny Alabama River hamlet of Gee’s Bend –– received international acclaim at art museums throughout the United States, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The New York Times hailed the quilts as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”

“I was 13 when I started quilting; 12 when I started pulling the thread through the needle for my mamma,” Mary Lee Bendolph, 72, said at the exhibit opening last Friday, standing in front of her raspberry, pink, brown and tan quilt in a pink floral suit with her hair neatly coiffed. “I watched the women and I wanted to learn.”

The colorful and imaginative quilts, crafted amid the isolation and poverty of the rural South in as far back as the 1920s, resemble the modern abstract paintings that received praise –– and high price tags –– in galleries throughout Paris and New York around the same time.

The women, descendants of slaves, grew up in the impoverished and isolated town of Gee’s Bend, which was cut off from the outside world on three sides by the Alabama River. There, they raised large families, worked in cotton fields and made quilts using whatever scraps they could find. They used sugar sacks and patches from worn pants.

“I can probably make a quilt out of anything,” Bendolph said. She wasn’t kidding — her quilt was made from “cotton corduroy, twill and assorted polyesters.” In fact, she said, those “polyesters” came from some double-knit leisure suits sent to Gee’s Bend from Bridgeport, Conn., by a former resident in the 1970s. “We weren’t into fashion, so we made a quilt out of it,” she said.

Nowadays, the diminishing number of survivors of this quilting group lives very different lives, flying around the country to serve witness to their art.

In Fort Lauderdale, they viewed their large, colorful works hanging throughout the museum’s newly refurbished galleries. They accepted a proclamation, autographed the book that accompanies the show, gave interviews and, more often than not, warmly hugged the interviewers.

Nettie Young, who, at 90, has been to all the exhibit openings, said she didn’t follow established patterns when learning to quilt. “I wish I had always stayed with my own ideas,” she said, standing by her black, white and red quilt named “Milky Way” (which has been replicated as a scarf). “God gave me that spirit.”

Another of the quilters, Lucy Mingo, began doing quilts when she was 14. She’s now 76, with 10 children, eight of whom have gone to college. “The thing about quilting is that, once you start doing it, you forget your problems,” she said. “It takes any of them you have away.”

The Quilts of Gee’s Bend continues through Jan. 7 at the Museum of Art, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale. For more information, call 954-525-5500 or visit www.moafl.org.