ART AND HUMANITY OF ALLAN ROHAN CRITE CELEBRATED IN BOSTON

Select Gardner Museum exhibition images here. 
Select Boston Athenaeum exhibition images here. 
 

October 20, 2025 (Boston, MA)—A comprehensive retrospective of the works of Allan Rohan Crite (1910–2007), highlighting the divine found in  everyday life, will be on view in Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from October 23, 2025 – January 19, 2026. The survey explores Crite’s decades-long career depicting sacred and secular subjects, from religious-themed prints and watercolors rendering the holy figures as Black to vivid paintings of street scenes showing the quotidian moments of Boston’s African American community. Additionally, Visions of Black Madonnas, juxtaposing Crite’s images of Black Madonnas with a 16th-century devotional work from the Gardner’s collection, and Allan Crite - American Griot, 2025, a new work by Robert T. Freeman for the Museum’s façade, pay tribute to the legacy of Allan Rohan Crite. 

At the Boston Athenaeum, the concurrent exhibition Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston delves further into Crite’s long career and legacy as a storyteller and knowledge keeper. The Gardner Museum and Athenaeum, both institutions for which Crite had great affection, worked together to present these exhibitions—a cross-city celebration of a generous artist dedicated to representing the glory of his multicultural, multiracial, and multigenerational community.
 

Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory
Hostetter Gallery 
October 23, 2025 – January 19, 2026

In a career that spanned most of the 20th century, Crite saw himself as an “artist-storyteller” devoted to illustrating Boston’s predominantly Black neighborhoods of Lower Roxbury and the South End through periods of immense social and economic change. Displayed in the Museum’s Hostetter Gallery, Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory encompasses 117 works—oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, works on paper, lithographs, books, and collages. The range of mediums and breadth of output is a testament to this multidisciplinary artist and his intellectually curious, artistically experimental practice. The exhibition includes loans from the Boston Athenaeum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Phillips Collection; Museum of African American History (Boston, Nantucket); in addition to several private lenders. Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory was co-curated by Diana Seave Greenwald, William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Gardner Museum, and Theodore C. Landsmark, Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University as well as Crite’s friend and collaborator. The Museum also collaborated with a group of artists and spiritual leaders in Boston who knew Crite personally or were inspired by him.

“Community is at the center of Allan Rohan Crite’s art. For nearly eight decades he religiously documented the diverse neighborhoods he inhabited, devoting himself to preserving the stories of those around him,” states Peggy Fogelman, Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the Gardner Museum. “The Gardner Museum was a place of wonder and source of inspiration for him from an early age, making this presentation of his life’s work—and his own story—a beautiful full-circle moment.”

Born to Annamae and Oscar Crite in 1910, Allan’s family relocated to Boston (from New Jersey) that same year. Values of faith, education, culture, and community were instilled in their family life. A personal connection to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum started as a child. Annamae, encouraging her son’s artistic talents, would regularly take Allan to local museums and cultural sites. (In fact, an art school field trip to the Gardner Museum [around 1919] led to a chance encounter between Annamae and Isabella Stewart Gardner [d. 1924] who invited her for tea.) A photocopy of young Allan’s drawing Mrs. John Gardner’s Court from Memory (1921) is on view in the exhibition. 

In 1993, Crite was invited to speak at the Gardner as part of a lecture series of notable artists and scholars. In his remarks, Crite spoke of the Museum as a “blaze of glory, of color, of flowers,” a place where he would seek art historical inspiration throughout his life, even incorporating images of the Museum’s exterior in works like St. Luke the Evangelist (1959), on loan from the Boston Public Library. Sadly, Crite’s own dream of converting his South End brownstone—a community gathering space of learning and civic dialogue, filled to the brim with artworks—into a house museum would never come to fruition. Crite passed away in 2007 at the age of 97. 

In the 1930s and 40s, Crite created a series of scenes from his neighborhood—paintings capturing the joy in life’s everyday moments. These lively depictions include Parade on Hammond Street (1935) and School’s Out (1936). Harriet and Leon (1941) and Ice (1939), seen together for the first time, each depict an African American couple in profile, stylishly dressed on a snowy winter’s day. 

“Allan Rohan Crite’s work shows a fine eye for human forms in urban environments, and an affection and empathy for depicting African American families and spiritual values,” shares Theodore Landsmark. “His art is like a pulsing record of urban life that reverberates across almost a century.”

The Handy Street Bridge (1939) and Come On, Gramps (1940) highlight the diversity of lived experience in a city undergoing major transition and on the verge of becoming increasingly segregated. Burning and Digging: South End Housing Project (1940) exposes the realities of gentrification and the impact of “urban renewal” or "removal" as Crite would describe. 

In many of his works, architecture takes pride of place with a church and steeple as part of the landscape. This was not limited to exteriors, as shown in two paintings on loan from Boston’s Church of St. Augustine and St. Martin, where Crite worshipped. The Children’s Mass (1936) and The Choir Singer (1941) highlight the spiritual life of a choir and congregants within a stately church interior furnished with windows aglow. 

A devout Episcoplian, religion and faith factored prominently into Crite’s portfolio in countless examples of art for worship. Biblical illustrations, like Stations of the Cross (about 1947), and covers of sheet music for spiritual hymns, such as Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven (1948), incorporate dark-skinned holy figures and exalt Black religious song and culture. Some of Crite’s works fuse the spiritual with the everyday like his apparitions of holy figures set amidst Boston’s historic architectural landmarks. His Transportation Madonnas series, including a Streetcar Madonna (1946) watercolor of a Black Virgin Mary and young Jesus amid commuters on a trolley, reflect a theme he would revisit throughout his life. Around this time, Crite made a radical shift in his art production, abandoning oil painting for printmaking, a medium that would allow broad dissemination of his faith-based images and messages of inclusion and representation.

“From liturgical drawings explicitly rendering the holy figures as Black, to works confronting the destructive realities of urban renewal and gentrification, Crite was constantly innovating,” explains Diana Seave Greenwald, William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection, co-curator of Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory and curator of Visions of Black Madonnas. “In whatever he was creating he managed to find the divine in the everyday.”  

Allan Rohan Crite was often referred to as the “Dean of African American Artists” in New England, mentoring dozens of artists and academics and welcoming countless schoolchildren into his home to share his love of art. Deeply Rooted In the NeighborHOOD, Homage to Allan Rohan Crite (2021), a quilted collage overlaid with painted figures, created by two of his mentees, Johnetta Tinker and Susan Thompson, honors the artist’s  legacy and love of community. 

The Gardner Museum and Boston Athenaeum have also co-published Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood Liturgy, produced by Princeton University Press, the first extensively researched, fully illustrated, career-spanning book about the artist. Scholars, historians, artists, and community leaders influenced by Crite have contributed essays and recollections to the publication. Additionally, works from the Gardner and Athenaeum’s exhibitions will be combined to create Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood, on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, starting in February (2026).

Visions of Black Madonnas 
Fenway Gallery 
October 23, 2025 – January 19, 2026

Across time, cultures, and geographies, Mary, the mother of Jesus, has appeared as a Black woman (commonly referred to as “Black Madonna”) in the Christian visual tradition. The exhibition Visions of Black Madonnas juxtaposes the Museum’s Black Glass Madonna (1570–91), a devotional work that Allan Rohan Crite admired and visited often, with Crite’s own depictions of a Black Madonna and Child, a frequent subject of the artist. Museum visitors will experience the Gardner Museum’s 400-year old work along with Crite’s contemporary Christian imagery that centered his Black neighbors in a sacred Christian history and affirmed the interconnected humanity of all people. 

Curated by Diana Seave Greenwald, along with Gardner colleagues, Nathaniel Silver and Sylvia Hickman, the exhibition of 15 works highlights the Museum’s recently-conserved Black Glass Madonna, a depiction of a Black Madonna wearing gold robes and gem-encrusted crown, commissioned by Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria. Created by skilled Venetian glass artisans who employed a cutting-edge glasswork technique, the sculpture is likely based on a statue of Our Lady of Loreto as a testament to the royal’s devotion to the dark-skinned, miracle-working Madonna of central Italy. In conversation with the 16th-century Black Glass Madonna is a selection of works by Crite created between 1934–87, placing the artist at the forefront of a movement in the mid-1900s to depict holy figures as Black. Examples include church bulletins—booklets personalized by congregations for weekly worship and news—showcasing a range of Crite’s artistic styles, methods, and global art historical influences. Crite designed and printed more than a thousand pamphlets a week in his home for distribution to parishes in Boston and across the country, even learning Spanish to communicate with new neighbors in the South End and create bulletins for their churches. 

Another depiction of the Virgin and Child, from many in Isabella’s collection, The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints and Angels (1355–60), is included in the Fenway Gallery exhibition to provide additional context. This work by Bartolomeo Bulgarini (Italian, active Siena by 1337–died 1378) showing a light-skinned Madonna shares a composition with the Black Glass Madonna. The Virgin Mary holds the infant Christ surrounded by angels and saints while an adult Jesus appears at the top of the composition. This small-scale work, adorned with gold leaf, was intended for private, personal worship. The painted images are set within an ornate box called a tabernacle, suggesting one way the Gardner’s Black Glass Madonna, missing its original frame, may have been presented when it was first made.

Allan Crite - American Griot, 2025
Robert T. Freeman
October 14, 2025 – February 10, 2026
Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade

A newly commissioned, public work of art by Gardner Museum Artist-in-Residence Robert T. Freeman (b. 1946, USA)—Allan Crite - American Griot, 2025—pays tribute to the life and work of Allan Rohan Crite, the artist-storyteller who delighted in chronicling the visual beauty of his African American community. Freeman captures Crite as larger-than-life—an exalted figure, generous mentor, and documentarian watching over his beloved city.  

Freeman mirrors Crite’s illustrations of divine figures rising above Boston, watching over the neighborhoods he spent his life recording. Honoring the manner in which Crite took on the role of griot—storyteller, advisor, and keeper of history—Freeman surrounds Crite with friends, community members, and children pulled from his street scene paintings, each a record of a day in the life of Boston’s Roxbury and South End neighborhoods.  Among these is Crite’s Harriet and Leon (1941), also on view in the Hostetter gallery. Freeman’s  public work of art is displayed on the Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade on Evans Way, not far from the neighborhoods where Crite lived throughout his life. 

Robert T. Freeman is a figurative painter known for his bold gestural brushwork, vivid color palette, geometric forms, and abstract approach to his subjects. This project was overseen by Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art. New site-specific works have been commissioned by the Museum for its Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade since 2012. The fabric scrim serves as an outdoor canvas that extends the gallery space beyond the Museum’s interior walls and serves as public art in the City of Boston.

In addition to the suite of exhibitions at the Gardner Museum, the Boston Athenaeum’s Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston, and accompanying exhibition of Ekua Holmes collages, will be on view from October 23, 2025 – January 24, 2026. Admission to the exhibition and first floor of the Athenaeum will be free to Gardner Museum visitors and members. Those who first purchase a ticket to the exhibition at the Athenaeum will receive a code for $2 off admission to the Gardner.

There are other ways to celebrate the life and legacy of Allan Rohan Crite around the city of Boston:

• Allan Rohan Crite’s Boston: This digital map of Boston, produced by the Boston Athenaeum, highlights locations from Crite’s South End and Roxbury neighborhoods (and beyond) that were significant to the artist
• Allan Rohan Crite: Madonna of the Subway: Tufts University Art Galleries (Medford) through May 31, 2026
• All Day – All Night, The Angels Watching Over Me: Select Collaborative Works of Allan Rohan Crite and Susan Thompson: Spoke Gallery through January 30, 2026
• New work by Johnetta Tinker: City Hall from November 20, 2025 – January 2026
• Crite Park: The South End park named for Crite is being redesigned and rejuvenated as a community space; dedication and ribbon cutting is expected in 2026

PUBLIC PROGRAMS / Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Allan Rohan Crite: The Dean of African American Arts in New England
Thursday, October 23, 2025, 7 – 8:30 pm
Join us to celebrate the life and legacy of Allan Rohan Crite, who prolifically documented the daily life of Black Bostonians. Through personal anecdotes and professional reflections, this conversation between local scholars and community leaders will honor the work of a Boston notable who has long deserved greater national recognition. 

“The Street is a Memory”: Resisting Boston’s Urban Removal 
Thursday, November 13, 2025, 7 – 8:30 pm 
Allan Rohan Crite was both a history keeper and anti-gentrification activist, using his renderings of his neighbors in the South End to document the displacement caused by urban renewal. Join us as we discuss this complex history through the work of community trusts, neighborhood activists, policy makers, and artists striving to preserve and protect Boston’s diverse neighborhoods and communities.  

Black Madonnas: The Spiritual Made Visual 
Thursday, December 11, 2025, 7 – 8:30 pm
Vocalist Nedelka Prescod offers a musical opening to a discussion of the Black woman in Christian iconography. Crite’s celebration of the everyday woman, in tandem with his deep faith, led him to contribute beautiful and affecting imagery to the centuries-long tradition of the Black Madonna.  This program examines that history from the Black Glass Madonna of 1500s Europe acquired by Isabella Stewart Gardner to Crite’s images of Mary as a Black mother on public transportation. This program is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

From Earth to Heaven: A Community Sing-Along to Celebrate the Art & Liturgy of Allan Rohan Crite
Monday, January 19, 2026, 11 am – 5 pm 
On Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, and the final day of the exhibition, Boston City Singers Youth Choir will fill the Courtyard with hymns beloved by Crite in a musical celebration of his life and legacy.

Free First Thursday — November  | First Thursday of the month, 5 – 9 pm
On November 6, experience the sanctity of art and community with a vocal performance in the Courtyard by Soprano Candice Hoyes, accompanied by pianist Chris Cooley, performing Crite-inspired songs and art-making designed by Polly Thayer Starr Visiting Artist Crystal Bi.

Saturday Open Studio | Saturdays, 1 – 4 pm
Explore one of Crite’s favorite approaches to artmaking, “the multiple,” with a hands-on studio experience designed by Polly Thayer Starr Visiting Artist Crystal Bi.