The impact of Allan Rohan Crite (1910–2007) as an artist and a community leader is the subject of exhibitions at two historic Boston cultural institutions that he cherished: the Boston Athenaeum and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

The Gardner Museum, a lifelong place of inspiration for Crite, presents Allan Rohan Crite:

Urban Glory through Jan. 19; and at the Boston Athenaeum, Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston is on view through Jan. 24.

Crite was a member of the Boston Athenæum and donated many of his works to this library, museum and cultural center on Beacon Hill, which houses one of the largest institutional collections of his art and archives.

As part of their concurrent celebration of Crite and his legacy, the Gardner and the Athenaeum have co-published the first catalog of Crite’s work, “Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood Liturgy,” edited by Diana Greenwald and Christina Michelon, curators, respectively of the Gardner and Athenaeum exhibitions. The catalog is the first extensively researched, fully illustrated, career-spanning book about Crite and includes scholarly essays and recollections of the artist from his friends and colleagues.

Crite is well known for his paintings depicting daily life in the Black community of Boston’s Lower Roxbury and South End neighborhoods during the 1930s and 1940s. As massive rebuilding projects displaced his family and demolished entire neighborhoods, with art, and later through advocacy, he practiced his own kind of urban renewal.

Seen today, his works, like the tales of griots in West Africa, sustain community by telling its stories.

Crite’s parents, Annamae and Oscar, raised him to participate in their parish and neighborhood as well the surrounding city. Annamae nurtured her son’s talents, taking him to art lessons in the South End at the Children’s Art Centre and visits to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as well as to the Gardner.

In 1971, when his family’s longtime home at 2 Dilworth Street in Lower Roxbury was torn down for a Boston redevelopment project, Crite and his widowed mother moved to 410 Columbus Ave. in the South End. A plaque on the row house recognizes Crite as a “Master Visual Artist, Painter, Printmaker, Author, Lecturer, Historian and Good Neighbor.” Planning is underway for a nearby commemorative park.