Three exhibits celebrate the legacy of SMFA at Tufts alum Allan Rohan Crite, a mentor to artists and activists
“Parade on Hammond Street,” 1935. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., acquired 1942. Courtesy of the Allan Rohan Crite Research Institute and Library
Allan Rohan Crite’s 1937 painting “Columbus Avenue” is teeming with life. The sidewalks bustle with women in fur-collared coats, men in suits and scarves, and nearly a dozen children. Toward the left, three young women—perhaps secretaries on their lunch break—huddle together in conversation. Two of them make an “oh!” shape with their mouths, as if they had just heard a shocking piece of neighborhood gossip.
Crite, who studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (now SMFA at Tufts) in the 1930s and lived almost his entire life (1910-2007) in Boston, made dozens of paintings set in the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Lower Roxbury and the South End.
Unlike many other depictions of Black Americans at the time, such as Archibald Motley’s paintings of jazz culture and nightlife in Chicago, Crite’s works captured everyday life.
“Columbus Avenue,” 1937. Courtesy of Museum of African American History Boston | Nantucket. Courtesy of the Allan Rohan Crite Research Institute and Library
“Back there in the ’30s, the concept of Blacks was usually of somebody up in Harlem, or the sharecropper from the Deep South, or what you might call the jazz Negro,” Crite said in a 1979 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. “But the ordinary person—you might say middle-class—you just didn’t hear about them. So what I did in my drawings was just to try to do the life of people as I saw them round about me.”
Crite’s “neighborhood paintings,” while his most famous works, are just one facet of a long and varied career. A devout Episcopalian, he combined his love of religious art with his affection for his city, creating urban vignettes with Christian themes.
Greater Boston is having a citywide celebration of Crite, with simultaneous exhibitions of his work at the Boston Athenaeum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Tufts University Art Galleries. The exhibits recognize him as not only a skilled artist, but as a mentor and supporter of Black creators and activists throughout New England.
Rooted in Boston
After completing his SMFA studies in 1936, Crite had a promising start to his career. His work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; national magazines published his illustrations; and he was represented by a gallery on Boston’s Newbury Street, which sold one of his neighborhood paintings to a major collector of modern art.
But from there, he did not follow the expected trajectory, explained Diana Greenwald, curator of the collection at the Gardner Museum and co-curator of its Crite exhibit.
“When he is just coming out of his time at the School of Museum of Fine Arts, this path is open to maybe move to New York to pursue art world success in a standard way,” Greenwald said. “And he doesn’t go. He chooses to stay in Boston. He chooses to get a day job.”
Crite worked briefly as a mapmaker before taking a position in 1941 as an engineering draftsman and technical illustrator at the Charlestown Navy Yard. He would spend more than 30 years working at the yard, taking pride in the detailed perspective drawings he made to guide shipbuilders in their work.
In his off hours, he made art that fed his passions. One was his community. As a visual storyteller of the Black lives around him, he painted families walking to church in “Cambridge, Sunday Morning”; men on a street corner reading about the death of President Roosevelt in “The News”; and a drum major, brass band, and crowd of finely dressed spectators in “Parade on Hammond Street.”
“And the Lord Said,” 1934. Courtesy of Museum of African American History Boston | Nantucket. Courtesy of the Allan Rohan Crite Research Institute and Library
Edmund Barry Gaither, executive director emeritus of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, wrote that Crite’s representation of Black people was “like an antidote” to the common caricatures of rural bumpkins or exotic jazz characters.
As Gaither writes in the Gardner exhibit book Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood Liturgy, “The argument that Mr. Crite’s work made was that the majesty of Black people resided in their simple humanity, and that they were people first. You were not there for someone else’s entertainment.”
A Black Jesus in the City
Throughout his life, Crite celebrated spirituality through his art. From the time he was a boy, he would sketch Bible scenes and characters. He illustrated the words of African American spirituals, publishing two books of songs in the early 1940s.
He was commissioned to design artwork for church interiors, including a 345-square-foot mural for St. Augustine’s Church in Brooklyn, New York. He also lectured on religious art at Episcopal churches around the country.
But his liturgical art was far from conventional. “From very early in his career in the ’30s, he shows holy figures as Black, which is really radical for the time,” Greenwald said. The biblical characters would often be set in ordinary places such as busy street corners. In drawings he made for a church in St. Louis, for example, a Black Jesus carries the cross for his crucifixion through an urban American neighborhood.
"The Nativity According to St. Luke," about 1947. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, fund in memory of Horatio Greenough Curtis. Courtesy of the Allan Rohan Crite Research Institute and Library. Photo © 2025 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
When he spoke about such artworks, Crite was a quiet renegade. People would ask him why he made the holy figures Black, and he would reply that it made “a good composition” and let it go at that.
“I say that partly to be facetious, partly being sardonic, and partly getting the message across,” he said years later.
By the end of the 1940s, Crite had switched from oil painting to watercolors, drawings, and other media. His detailed line drawings lent themselves to his new favorite tool: the printing press.
“Where art historians are always glorifying the singular canvas, he buys a press and he makes many, many prints so that he can directly distribute his art,” Greenwald said. “It’s a very democratic approach to making art and to getting it into the hands of people.”
“Sometimes I'm up; illustration for Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven (Cambridge, Mass., 1948),” 1937. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Courtesy of the Allan Rohan Crite Research Institute and Library
One vehicle for his art was the humble church bulletin. Over three decades starting in 1955, he mailed more than 1,200 bulletins to Episcopal parishes, with original illustrated covers that could be customized by the congregations.
In addition to giving away many of his works to city institutions like the Boston Athenaeum, he produced inexpensive lithographic prints. One series he made in the 1980s, echoing an early painting of his called “Madonna of the Subway,” depicts the Virgin Mary and Christ child in traditional African dress riding the trains of Boston.
Tufts University recently acquired the series, along with some of Crite’s handmade books, for its permanent collection. The series, now on display in the Slater Concourse on the Medford/Somerville Campus, “captures Crite’s connection to the city, to his religiosity, and to Black life in Boston,” said Dina Deitsch, director and chief curator of the Tufts University Art Galleries.
“Madonna of the Subway—Downtown Express,” 1987. Courtesy of the Tufts University Art Galleries
The juxtaposition of the figures is both powerful and lighthearted, Deitsch said, as the holy mother and child with their outsized haloes sit placidly between the other passengers on the train. Additionally, “the prints are just beautiful depictions of the city in the 1980s,” Deitsch said, as viewing the series is like riding the train and catching glimpses out the window of places like Roxbury and the South End.
Art on His Own Terms
Crite’s focus on making high-volume art on his own terms may have hurt his chances at fame, Greenwald said.
“There are decisions he could have made, which some of his friends are telling him to make, and he’s specifically choosing not to play the game that gets you to be renowned nationally,” Greenwald said. “And some of that I really respect.”
Regionally, however, Crite was legendary, not only for his talent as an artist but as a rock of his communities. He showed up at other artists’ shows and wrote letters of encouragement to many of them, including fellow SMFA at Tufts alum John Wilson, who credited Crite as a profound influence on his career.
“Allan Rohan Crite on Columbus Avenue in Boston's South End,” 1981. Photo: Courtesy of Aukram Burton, RamImages.com
In the early 1980s, Crite was a founding member of the Boston Collective, a group of Black artists (the others decades younger than him) who supported each other and exhibited together.
He became friends with activists like Mel King and civil rights attorney Theodore Landsmark, who said that Crite hosted impromptu gatherings that generated ideas about Black history and culture, spirituality, fine art, and of course, the neighborhoods he loved.
Landsmark, who co-curated the Gardner exhibit, said that when it became clear to Crite that gentrification was going to undermine the fabric of his lower-income community, “he opened his home to neighbors and others in the South End who were interested in discussing some of the issues, particularly around housing and displacement.”
Even when battling such unyielding forces, Landsmark said, Crite exuded joy and optimism.
As Landsmark writes in the exhibit book, “Allan believed that the future could be made bright by good people living together in community.”
