Allan Rohan Crite and the Gospel Truth

Allan Rohan Crite was an unassumingly radical artist. He depicted Black people as being everyday people in his South End neighborhood and painted images of the Madonna and Child in city settings, also reflections of the residents who lived in his community.

Allan Rohan Crite was an unassumingly radical artist. He depicted Black people as being everyday people in his South End neighborhood and painted images of the Madonna and Child in city settings, also reflections of the residents who lived in his community.

With his paintings, drawings and sketches, Crite (1910-2007) created an archive of the early and mid-20th century that documents the diverse, though largely Black, South End and Lower Roxbury areas of Boston, as well as their neartotal destruction by urban renewal.

Crite and his work were lauded recently by concurrent exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Boston Athenaeum, respectively titled “Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory" and “Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston.” Although both showings have closed, some of the artwork can be viewed online by clicking the titles above.

Crite was a generous man who gave his time and creativity to many in Boston, but especially to those in his community. On the plaque outside his former residence at 410 Columbus Ave., Crite is quoted describing himself as “a storyteller of my part of the l of man. … I am a storyteller of my view of the African American experience: in a local sense the neighborhood; and in a larger sense, a part of the total human experience.”

Crite told his gospel truth, sacred and secular, in his works.

He was born in New Jersey but had lived in the South End since infancy, when his parents, Annamae and Oscar William Crite, moved from Plainfield, New Jersey, after Oscar obtained an engineering job in Boston. The Crites first lived on Shawmut Avenue, then settled at 2 Dilworth Street in 1925. Oscar, an engineer who was seriously injured in a 1929 industrial accident, died in 1937. Annamae and Allan continued living on Dilworth, which was located between Camden and Northampton streets and ran parallel to Columbus Avenue, until 1971. That was when one of Boston’s urban renewal projects disappeared Dilworth Street, forcing the Crites to find another place to live. The artist, as well as many others, referred to such projects as “urban removal” because they dispersed hundreds of residents from the South End and Lower Roxbury areas.

But Crite had started documenting the neighborhoods’ losses well before the 1970s. For example, he was in his 20s when he embarked upon his “Neighborhood Series,” paintings that show people and places in the South End and Lower Roxbury. Among the series is a 1940 work titled “Wrecking Old Houses,” which depicts a bulldozer taking out a wood dwelling.

When they had to vacate their longtime Dilworth Street home in 1971, Crite and his mother were fortunate to be able to relocate nearby at 410 Columbus Ave.

This slender, four-story townhouse had a multipurpose function; it served not only as living quarters but also had the characteristics of a museum/warehouse/studio/display space, and was, of course, a gathering place where Crite’s cohorts many of them fellow artists and mentees, as well as neighbors, friends and community activists, visited or assembled..

And of course, Crite did his work there. In addition to creating art, the lifelong Episcopalian made drawings and printed materials for the weekly bulletins distributed at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church on Shawmut Avenue in the South End. Crite also created a number of religion-themed works, including triptychs, paintings, altarpieces and illustrated collections of African American spirituals.

In 1986, South End residents successfully lobbied the City Council to name the intersection of Columbus Avenue and West Canton and Appleton streets “Allan Rohan Crite Square.” In 2021, the South End Landmark District Commission approved the new design to the park, which was led by the The Friends of Crite Park neighborhood organization. The project to transform that triangular parcel in Crite Park is nearing completion.

Crite and his wife, Jackie Cox-Crite, who wed in 1993, envisioned establishing 410 Columbus Avenue as a house museum as well as the Crite Research Institute.

The Gardner Museum and Boston Athenaeum exhibitions aren’t the first time Boston cultural institutions have united to display Crite’s works. Almost immediately after his death in 2007 and running through 2008, the Athenaeum, Boston Public Library and the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury teamed up to present exhibitions of the artist’s work.

Photographs, graphics, and sources;

Graphic 1: Crite at his desk in 1952 working as an Engineering Draftsman and Technical Illustrator at the Boston Naval Shipyard. (Photo Courtesy of the National Park Service).

Graphic 2: Harriet and Leon (Photo Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum).

Graphic 3: Wrecking Old Houses. (Photo Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum).

Graphic 4: Rendering of Crite Park, (Photo Courtesy of The Friends of Crite Park).