What is the difference between a quilt and a painting? Mostly it has to do with where you encounter the object. If it’s on a bed, it’s one thing: utilitarian. If it’s on the wall, it’s another: primarily aesthetic. We can think of quilts as paintings even though they usually aren’t painted.

On the other hand, if the artist were Robert Rauschenberg, the quilt could be simultaneously on the bed and on the wall. But forget Rauschenberg: Our artist today is Nancy Crow, who is showing her resplendent abstract quilts at Snyderman Gallery.

Quilts traditionally have symbolic meanings, as do paintings. One might argue that the family information or conventional character of named quilt patterns (log cabin, flying geese, tumbling blocks) is trivial compared to the subject matter of paintings, but when you examine the history of painting you will find that often the most "trivial" and conventional subjects result in timelessly appealing works of art. In contemporary urban households, quilts have an advantage over framed paintings in that they can be stored and transported easily. The fabrics used to make quilts add a tangible pleasure.

Nancy Crow, like many contemporary quilt-makers, treats quilts as paintings. She uses hand-dyed cottons, which allows her to control colors very exactly. Proportions and sizes -- and the fact that they are hanging on the wall -- declare that these quilts might warm your heart but they should never warm your bed.

Crow's work is more or less rectangular but never rigidly geometric. The outer edges of most of her quilts maintain reasonable horizontals and verticals, although Constructions #38, the most irregular work in the show, is a trapezoid with a slight undulation along its bottom edge. This hand-hewn treatment of straight lines and right angles builds self-assured structures, which are at once improvisational and internalized.

Perhaps the most common pieced quilt is a "strip quilt." Using strips of cloth, the piecer is spared the labor of cutting out individual shapes; she joins rows of strips and then cuts across them, making a striped strip which can then be stacked on another one in a bricklike "construction." This is undoubtedly how Crow developed the designs in this exhibition.

Understanding strip piecing offers insight into Crow's color experiments. She makes groups of strips containing identical, usually alternating, colors; then uses the embedded harmonies in reversed, staggered or perpendicular patterns. She can frame units with solid-colored strips. Each group of strips becomes something like a musical motif to be utilized in a variety of ways. Groups of strips lend themselves to groups of similar quilts offering formal variations on proportions, colors and shapes.

In the "Constructions" series, Crow often relates the exterior shape of the quilt to the interior patterns. Several square quilts in the group are quartered into squares, each dominated by a particular color palette. Each quarter breaks into other, more subtly color-defined rectangles. An overall network of darks weaves through contrasting areas of strong and muted color, light and darker color. Cool olive green and pale gray contrast with dark neutral ochres and forest greens. The greens segue into an adjacent panel of mostly indigo blues surrounding a tiny beacon of flame orange. It's order and chaos, an almost musical exploration.

In contrast to the square quilts, another group consists of long vertical quilts composed of long, mostly vertical stripes, alternately black or another dark color and a lighter color. These include Constructions #32 and Constructions #17, which has a small contrasting section of horizontal stripes. Nesting squares banded with stripes are featured in works like Constructions #10, while ladderlike forms dominate Constructions #21. Crow develops a jumpy syncopated Stuart Davis quality in Constructions #54, #55 and the trapezoidal #38.

In quilt-making, after piecing comes actual quilting: sewing rows of stitches that join the quilt top to the back. Much of the beauty of quilts like these -- as opposed to machine-quilted works -- comes from the subtle adjustment of hand-held fabric to hand-wielded needle and thread -- an acknowledgment of the character of the particular fabric and thread. Minute variations build a more authentic relationship.

Quilting adds texture and another layer of design to the quilt itself. Crow's quilts are all quilted by Marla Hattabaugh, "with patterns denoted by Nancy Crow," the catalog says in tiny letters at the bottom of the last page. Hattabaugh sews wonderfully straight, even stitches. The patterns are mostly superimposed grids, though the long strip quilts are emphasized by long lines of quilting.

The quilts in this show descend from the tradition of making something functional and from the pleasure women of many cultures brought to this task, but they could not exist apart from the non-functional tradition of painting and making things simply to delight the eye and tease the intellect. In piecing together these contrasting but linked traditions, they become very complete and satisfying works of art.