When Allan Rohan Crite was a boy, his mother Annamae would take him on trips to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where he would create sketches from his memories.
Now, 18 years after the Boston native’s death, Crite’s work is finally hanging in that museum, a sign of well-deserved recognition of his role as a long-underappreciated laureate of Black artistry.
“Allan was documenting his neighborhood and his neighbors and his spiritual activity,” said Ted Landsmark, co-curator of the Gardner’s new retrospective “Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory.”
“He gave me a much clearer sense of the underlying spirit that existed within Boston’s African-American community.”
“Urban Glory” runs through Jan. 19 alongside another Crite exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum, where the artist donated much of his work in 1971. “Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston” runs through Jan. 24. Both exhibitions highlight the artist, not just as an innovative painter, drafter, historian and poet, but as a neighborhood father figure who merged the spirituality of Black Madonnas with the everyday bustle of streetcars.
Working out of his home studio in South Boston, Crite was constantly creating, printing copies of his work on a mimeograph machine and distributing them throughout the community.
“I love the fact that it took two museums to show Mr. Crite’s work,” said Ekua Holmes, a mixed-media artist, community activist and mentee of Crite. “Probably three would have been even better, but now that he is being celebrated, to have it in two spaces I think is wonderful.”
Crite often welcomed other artists to his studio, running salons and providing free mentorship to students like Holmes and contemporary artist Johnetta Tinker. After Tinker’s father passed away, she tried to cancel an upcoming exhibition. But she said Crite convinced her to continue showcasing her work, and the two later became colleagues in the Boston Collective — a diverse group of young artists led by Crite in the 1980s.
“The first time I walked into his house, I said the craziest thing: ‘Is this all your work?’” Tinker said. “It was just overwhelming — layers and layers and layers of art. I thought then I would never be able to catch up.”
And yet Crite, who worked a day job at the Charlestown Navy Yard for more than 30 years, never achieved the sort of public success that his influence indicates. A soft-spoken man, he prioritized his Episcopalian faith, and preferred portraying “the lives of families and church communities and children in the community that he knew extremely well,” Landsmark said.
“Allan was extremely modest in terms of the way he presented himself to a wider public,” Landsmark said. “He was very intimately involved with the artist community in Boston, but he was involved with that community at a point in time when most of the media were not showing, representing or critiquing the work of artists of color.”
Following Crite’s death at age 97, Landsmark unsuccessfully attempted to turn the artist’s South Boston residence into a house museum. But with these new exhibitions, which comprise the largest retrospective of Crite’s work to date, artists and art-lovers alike will finally be able to take a peek behind the curtain of a modern master.
“He really was like our father in the arts,” Holmes said. “And we were proud of him. We were proud to be associated with him. And we felt his love for us as individuals and also as this community. So I just hope that people that see these exhibitions will allow themselves to be moved to be better.”
Guests
- Ted Landsmark, co-curator of “Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory” at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, distinguished professor of public policy and urban affairs at Northeastern University, lawyer, civic planner and civil rights activist.
- Ekua Holmes, community activist, mixed-media artist, mentee of Allan Rohan Crite.
- Johnetta Tinker, contemporary artist, mentee of Allan Rohan Crite.
