‘Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston’

The Athenaeum’s exhibition “Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston” was curated by Christina Michelon, formerly of the Boston Athenaeum and now curator of prints and drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Presenting works from its extensive Crite collection, the exhibition unfolds in the Athenaeum’s Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery and Leventhal Room.

The gallery installation opens with a 1977 statement by Crite in which he describes himself as a griot, a storyteller in the West African tradition. “That’s what I’ve been doing all of my life in all my drawings. I’m a storyteller.” Next to it is his oil painting “The News” (1945), which shows four men on the corner of Columbus Avenue and Northampton Street reading newspapers that report the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 12, 1945. The white folds of the newspapers center the urgent and absorbed figures of the men, who include a soldier.

An intimate, eye-level visual memoir unfolds on the gallery’s walls and in display cases, which present 84 images and objects, including oil sand watercolors, archival papers, drawings, letters, pages of books and works on paper.

Captivating watercolors render street scenes with more fluid lines and a lighter palette than in Crite’s oil paintings. In the lyrical “Fruit and snow: from my window at 2 Dilworth St.” (1940), the lines of the window frame and sidewalks below compliment the curves of the sieve and fruits.

Inducing a long gaze, the image shows the power of art: The house is destroyed; but this image stays.

“A course in music appreciation” (1940), with its animated, tender depiction of a motley group on a bench enjoying a portable record player, venerates community life.

In the 1950s, Crite adopted offset lithography and installed a press in his home, where he churned out liturgical drawings for weekly church bulletin covers as well as pamphlets advocating recognition of First Peoples and communities of color and other causes he cared about. On display is a printing plate he would draw on to immediately produce multiples.

Self-published documents are on display as well as beautiful ink drawings from “Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven” (1948), published by Harvard University Press with a forward by the great tenor Roland Hayes.

In “Our Lady of Harvard Square” (ca. 1955), the Madonna hovers over its warren of small streets and in “Our Lady of the Migrant Workers/Nuestra Senora de los Braceros” (1961) she joins the laborers.

Concluding the gallery exhibition is Crite’s “Settling the World’s Problems” (1933), which shows a group of men and their medley of expressive hands as they gab on a bench in Madison Park, lost in the 1960s to Roxbury urban renewal.

In the Leventhal Room, eight oil paintings by Crite from 1935 to 1941 are on display. One is a fine example of portraiture, “Mrs. Martin’s Misses” (1941). The three sisters were neighbors of the Crite family and fellow parishioners. With masterful use of color, line, light and shadow, Crite conveys his subjects’ features and the texture of their skin and clothing.

On display nearby is an illustrated timeline of Crite’s life and an installation by Roxbury-based artist Ekua Holmes, whom Crite mentored. She displays collages she made when planning “A Place to Grow,” her joyful mural in the Athenaeum Children’s Library that shows Black children at play in Boston settings.

Admission to the Athenaeum exhibition is free to Gardner Museum visitors and members. Those who visit the Athenaeum first will receive $2 off admission to the Gardner Museum.

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