‘Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory’

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum offers a broad view of Crite and his life in an exhibition co-curated by Diana Seave Greenwald, curator of the collection at the museum, and Theodore C. Landsmark, distinguished professor at Northeastern University, Crite’s friend and frequent collaborator.

Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory presents 117 works—oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, works on paper, lithographs, books and collages.

In the anteroom to the exhibition in the museum’s Hostetter Gallery, viewers are invited to “Meet Mr. Crite.” A gently audible soundscape by musician Danny Rivera braids street sounds and church music. A timeline presents milestones in Crite’s astonishing productive life. Among the writings and artworks on view are a 1932 self-portrait, a picture of the Gardner Museum Courtyard drawn by Crite at age 11, beautiful ink illustrations from a 1937 publication, “Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven,” and a host of Crite’s self-published essays and pamphlets.

His paintings from the 1930s through the 1950s have a pared down style influenced by African-inspired mid-century modernism. With zest for the music of human movement and the patterns visible in daily life — from swirling skirts to the shapes of row houses, Crite recorded what he saw in a warm amber palette often accented by signature dabs of yellow. Crite liked facts, and his 40 years as an illustrator at the Charlestown Navy Yard honed his eye for details.

The Hostetter installation presents works by theme, beginning with Crite’s Neighborhood Series of the 1930s and 1940s, showcasing scenes of daily life in his neighborhood. “Parade on Hammond Street” (1935) renders high-stepping marchers and smartly dressed onlookers. “Harriet and Leon” (1941) portrays its elegant subjects in profile as they stride by two curious boys. In the distance, under a mottled winter sky, a man unloads boxes of ice from his truck and a boy pulls a child on a sled. “School’s Out” (1936) shows a river of bobbing heads in the schoolyard; and closeup, mothers and children; and across the street, an elegantly clad woman strutting solo.

These street scenes gradually evolved, reflecting “urban removal” as Crite called it. His watercolor “Burning and Digging: South End Housing Project” (1940) is an energetic semi-abstract depiction of a bulldozer razing a brick wall. In “Sunlight and Shadow” (1941), Crite portrays women and babies in the dappled light of leafy Madison Park, a now lost urban retreat.

A devout Episcopalian, Crite painted what he saw — as well as what he believed. In his religious drawings and paintings, Crite’s holy figures have dark skins. His powerful 12-panel “Stations of the Cross” (about 1947) rendered on linoleum with hand-applied watercolor and metal leaf, pairs each image of Christ’s path to crucifixion and burial with a closeup of the feet. Crite’s paintings of rituals in the Church of St. Augustine and St. Martin, where he and his parents worshiped, are rich in light and shadow.

In the late 1940s he began injecting surreal apparitions into his street scenes. In his watercolor “Streetcar Madonna” (1961), a Black Madonna and Child are surrounded by commuters oblivious to their presence.

In a 1968 interview, Crite described himself as a “liturgical artist” and in his art and writings encouraged active participation in “the drama of redemption” — to care for the disempowered and overlooked. In his watercolor “Our Lady of the Migrant Workers” (1961), a brown Madonna and Child sit among field workers.

In 1959, at age 40, Crite turned from oil painting to printmaking, a medium that enabled him to widely disseminate his images. Wall displays and a video show his art-packed home, where he installed a Multilith press and hosted neighbors and fellow artists, including members of the Boston Collective, a group of Black artists he organized in 1979. Crite dreamed of converting his South End row house into a house museum. Instead, the house was sold.

But Crite’s ever-growing legacy lives on in these exhibitions, which, in the Hostetter Gallery, concludes with a work by two Boston Collective members, Johnetta Tinker and Susan Thompson. Their quilt painted with neighborhood scenes in four seasons, “Deeply Rooted In the NeighborHOOD, Homage to Allan Rohan Crite” (2021), captures Crite’s exuberance.

In a first-floor gallery, Greenwald has curated “Visions of Black Madonnas,” which presents Madonnas by Crite with two treasures from the Gardner’s collection. One is a “Black Glass Madonna” (1570-1591) in shimmering glass with gold robes and a gem-encrusted crown, commissioned by Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria as a tribute to Our Lady of Loreto, a dark-skinned, miracle-working Madonna. Also on view is the ornate late-Gothic painting “The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints and Angels” (1355–60) by Bartolomeo Bulgarini. They are accompanied by 13 Madonnas by Crite, among the many he composed and then printed by the thousands for church bulletin covers of parishes in and well beyond Boston — even learning Spanish to serve new neighbors in the South End.

On the facade of the Gardner Museum is “Allan Crite — American Griot” (2025) by Gardner Museum artist-in-residence Robert T. Freeman. Crite has a liturgical presence. Wearing a long blue robe, he is surrounded by figures from paintings he created in the tradition of a griot, a West African storyteller who is steward of a community’s culture and values.

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