Allan Rohan Crite (1910–2007) was an African American artist, mentor, and documentarian best known for his paintings of Boston and its diverse neighborhoods. Community members who knew Crite considered him to be a griot (pronounced GREE-oh), a storyteller in the West African tradition, because of his ability to recount the past and reproduce scenes of everyday life. His oil paintings produced through New Deal-era programs brought his talents to the international stage, and he is celebrated today as a multi-disciplinary artist and important figure in the broader movement of Black diasporic arts. Crite’s subject matter was as diverse as his choice of media; from his watercolors of the Boston neighborhoods of the South End and Lower Roxbury to lithograph prints featuring Black figures in Biblical scenes, Crite’s work inspired generations to come to visualize humanity and its many layers. As a near centenarian, Crite witnessed and experienced the many effects of the Great Migration, Harlem Renaissance, Great Depression, Civil Rights Movement, and Black Arts Movement. He was a lifelong learner and neighbor, stewarding the memories of his community and global struggles with consistency and compassion.
On March 20, 1910, in North Plainfield, New Jersey, Allan Rohan Crite was born to father Oscar William Crite (1875–1937), a stationary engineer, and mother Annamae Palmer Crite (1891–1977), a poet, homemaker, lifelong learner, and devout Episcopalian. The family moved north to Boston the following year, and Crite was raised in apartments between Boston’s neighboring Lower Roxbury and South End neighborhoods. Annamae often brought the young Crite along to visit local museums such as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. His deep connection to local museums and their global collections inspired his later use of multicultural motifs. At the encouragement of a teacher, he began attending free courses at the Children’s Art Centre in Boston’s South End neighborhood in 1918. His teachers, artists Charles Woodbury and Elizabeth Perkins, included his childhood drawings in their 1925 publication titled The Art of Seeing: Mental Training Through Drawing. The same year, Crite and his family moved to 2 Dilworth Street in Lower Roxbury, a burgeoning Black diasporic neighborhood.
Crite graduated from English High School in 1929 and enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) to study art and industrial design. During the Great Depression he joined two government assistance programs for artists: the Public Works of Art Project in 1934 and later the Federal Art Project. The programs provided financial and publicity support while Crite began to build an art career and worked on the paintings for his Neighborhood Series. He received a favorable review for his painting Settling the World’s Problems (1933) in The Boston Evening Transcript, landed his first solo show at the prestigious Grace Horne Gallery on Newbury Street, received the Boit Prize for Painting upon graduating SMFA in 1936, and exhibited his work at the Museum of Modern Art New York in 1940.
Crite joined the Charlestown Navy Yard as an engineering draughtsman and technical illustrator in 1940. The military site saw a growing demand for workers ahead of U.S. involvement in World War II (1939 –1945) and acted as a landing spot for the expanding population of African American migrants seeking employment opportunities in industrial cities during the Great Migration. While holding a full-time position, Crite maintained his practice as an artist illustrating his everyday experiences like commutes to the worksite and connections to his Episcopal faith. In 1948, Harvard University Press published Crite’s book of prints, Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven, which featured drawings of liturgical scenes featuring Black characters. The Boston Athenaeum exhibited original prints from the publication the same year. Crite would continue to produce the pre-eminent and radical form of liturgical art throughout his life. In 1955, he was able to expand his liturgical work by buying an offset lithography press and producing church programs for the greater Boston Episcopal Diocese. Using the press also transformed his personal artistic practice throughout the later years of his career.
As a lifelong learner, Crite traveled extensively to Europe, Puerto Rico, and Mexico from 1961 to 1969, and earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard’s Extension School in 1968. Between his trips and coursework, Crite felt inspired to engage with greater themes of migration, movement, and global interconnectedness. He published an illustrated booklet entitled The Cultural Foundations of America (1969) and the Boston Athenaeum published his written text Towards a Rediscovery of the Cultural Heritage of the United States (1968), both of which sought to retell the history of the United States with consideration for Indigenous histories and larger global movements. As international solidarity and collectivity became a larger part of Crite’s work, his family home at 2 Dilworth was torn down in 1971 as part of the City of Boston and Boston Redevelopment Authority’s transportation and urban renewal projects. The Black communities of the South End and Lower Roxbury suffered widespread displacement from government-backed projects starting in the 1960s. Crite and his mother Annamae moved to 410 Columbus Avenue, which served as his home, studio, and gallery. He gifted sixteen oils, thirty-nine watercolors, and fifteen ink drawings to the Boston Athenaeum the following year.
Allan Rohan Crite aged but never slowed down. He organized the Boston Collective in 1979 and mentored a new generation of local African American artists. He traveled to China in 1983 as a cohort member of the Community Fellows Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and returned to the country again with the same program in 1986 for an exchange and exhibition alongside Boston Collective members. He married Jacquelyn Cleveland Cox in 1993 and exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum again in 1997, where he received a proclamation from the Massachusetts Secretary of State. Crite died at age ninety-seven at 410 Columbus Avenue. His legacy lives on through the artists he mentored and stories he preserved.
