Famed artist Crite passes away at 97

Edmund Barry Gaither

The celebrated Boston artist Allan Rohan Crite died at his home on Sept. 6 of natural causes. He was especially known for his narrative paintings of the religious and social life of lower Roxbury and the South End; his depictions of Christian themes in contemporary, often local, settings; and his ecclesiastical subjects on gold leaf.

Over the eight decades of his career, Crite inspired generations of younger artists and was recognized as the dean of African American artists in New England. His place in American art is demonstrated by his inclusion in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Smithsonian Institution, Museum of African American History, Boston Athenaeum, Phillips Collection, Corcoran Gallery of American Art, Boston Public Library, Newark Museum and others, as well as by many one-person exhibitions, including 2001’s “Allan Rohan Crite: Artist-Reporter of the African American Community” at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle.

Born to Annamae Palmer and Oscar Crite in North Plainfield, N.J., in 1910, the infant Allan Rohan came to Boston when his parents relocated shortly after his birth. He grew up in lower Roxbury and attended public schools. His early interest in art was cultivated at the Children’s Art Center and nurtured by his mother, who regularly took him to the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum.

While still a Boston public school student, Crite took art classes at the Museum of Fine Arts by special arrangement. In 1929, he enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he completed studies in 1936. After two brief stints with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), he went to work in 1940 as a draughtsman at the Boston Naval Yard, where he remained until his retirement in 1974.

Simultaneously, he pursued his art career while cultivating his skills as a prodigious researcher, and actively involved himself in missions of the Episcopal Church. Along the way, he earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree from the Harvard Extension School, where he became a part-time librarian, and also studied at Boston University and the Massachusetts College of Art.

Crite also built close relationships with the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the Episcopal Divinity School and many local and national Episcopal parishes. After its founding in 1969, he broadened those associations to include the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and the Boston Collective, a group of younger African American artists with whom he traveled to China in the 1980s.

Throughout his long career, Crite was committed to making his art accessible. This desire led him to publish two books of ink-brush drawings: 1944’s “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord” and 1948’s “Three Spirituals,” both with Harvard University Press. He also regularly provided illustrations for church service programs for several Episcopal parishes, and he independently self-published waves of prints of his artwork, some hand-colored and some with gold leaf added.

A singular feature of Crite’s art was his placement of the holy personages in contemporary rural or urban settings.

In one illustrated spiritual, the Heavenly Host is a black singer hovering above Southern fields populated by a black farmer. In the “Madonna of the Subway” series, Mary sits comfortably on a Boston rapid transit train amid ordinary riders going about their daily business. In works inspired by his travels to Mexico and Puerto Rico, he captures the Nativity story set in the Americas. Indeed, he was a pioneering figure in the practice of representing Christian figures as black or Latino in American art.

Crite was a careful observer of places and people. His paintings and drawings of lower Roxbury and the South End document local architecture with great precision. Some portions of the city that were demolished during Boston’s urban renewal are today recorded only in his art.

Likewise, he tirelessly sketched people and put them in his art. In the late 1960s, when he undertook creating a series of extraordinary accordion books of global history, such as “Reflections on the Cultural Heritage of Afro-Asian-American Peoples of Color,” Crite included many portraits of political, social and arts figures from Boston amid glorious characters from the past. In such tomes Crite’s research is evident, for these works present a sweeping historical scope and richly textured understanding of the overlapping cultures that make up the human family.

Such accordion books sometimes folded out to more than 60 feet and were populated with thousands of figures. Like his self-published autobiography, they capture his spiritual thinking as well as his grasp of social history and cultural histories in the post-colonial world.

Among the last of Crite’s major projects was his remarkable “Book of Revelation,” produced by the New York-based Limited Editions Publishers, in which he created illustrations for the last book of the Bible. Bound in maroon cloth and printed on deluxe paper, “Revelation” brought together a lifetime of visual thinking about Christianity and its texts by an artist who loved almost equally the art of lines and paint, and the art of words.

In 1993, Crite married Jacquelyn Cleveland Crite, and they turned their attention to securing his legacy. Still in possession of a great portion of his art as well as his extensive library, they laid the groundwork for launching the Allan Rohan Crite Research Institute and Library. This fledging institution is committed to preserving Crite’s art and words for posterity. To help with its work, the family is requesting that, in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to the Crite Endowment Fund at the Bank of America Worldwide, or mailed to P.O. Box 960283, Boston, MA 02196.

Crite is survived by his wife, Jacquelyn; a cousin, Joan Prettyman of Philadelphia; and numerous nieces and nephews by marriage.

The wake will be held at J.S. Waterman & Sons, 580 Commercial Street, North End, tomorrow from 6 p.m. - 8 p.m. Funeral services will be held at Trinity Episcopal Church, Copley Square, on Saturday, Sept. 15, at 11 a.m.

Edmund Barry Gaither is the director of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists.