“War and Pieced: The Annette Gero Collection of Quilts from Military Fabrics”

War is made up of 90 percent boredom and 10 percent terror, as the adage goes. Created by soldiers, sailors or regimental tailors during European and British conflicts of the 18th and 19th centuries, these exceptionally beautiful quilts from the Annette Gero Collection were stitched as make-work for idle hours, or as occupational therapy for men wounded in mind and body.

Made from scraps of army uniforms, the quilts are mostly limited to shades of red, blue, gray and khaki. Still, the results are dazzling: large geometric patterns ranging from simple, interlocking triangles to ornate constructions—likely made by Indian tailors—embellished with chain stitching, beads and rosettes stamped out from tiny pieces of felt.

Many of the quilts display extraordinary visual sophistication. One example from the Napoleonic era contrasts soft rust, orange and gold with maroon, navy and black; another uses thousands of tiny hexagonal pieces to create a larger hexagon set against a backdrop of red and navy stripes.

The show mostly soft-pedals the brutality of empire building—Britain’s, for example—but one quilt commemorates the Anglo-Zulu War with a central motif of four converging bladelike shapes, each embroidered with a tiny emblem of African life. Though largely abstract, it seems permeated with the horror of that war and every other before or since.