Painting the Neighborhood

The life and work of artist Allan Rohan Crite (1910–2007) were defined by his communal, familial, and spiritual bonds. His family life centered on his close relationship with his mother, who raised him a devout Episcopalian, and both relationships – with his mother and with his church – are reflected in the stunningly beautiful portrayals of urban life Crite created during his long career. Over nearly eight decades, his work chronicled and celebrated the life of Boston’s Black community in the neighborhoods of the South End and Roxbury, where he became a mentor to younger Black artists through a group he formed known as the Boston Collective.

Crite’s career has received renewed attention with the book Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood Liturgy, edited by Diana Seave Greenwald and Christina Michelon (Princeton University Press, 2025), which was published in conjunction with joint exhibitions of Crite’s work at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Boston Athenaeum. The book includes essays by leading scholars on various aspects of the artist’s career, reminiscences from people who knew him, and copious reproductions of his art.

The son of an electrical engineer, Crite was raised in Boston. His homemaker mother, Annamae, was the dominant influence in his life. Together, from his earliest days, they attended St. Bartholomew’s in Cambridge, an Episcopal church organized and led by Black Bostonians. Annamae, herself an unpublished poet, encouraged Crite’s early inclinations for drawing by having him take art classes.

Her encouragement paid off. Crite was accepted into the Yale School of Art, though, in an early demonstration of unwavering devotion to his Boston roots – he would remain in the city until his death at age ninety-seven – he declined Yale’s offer, enrolling instead at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, studying industrial design. When his father, Oscar, suffered a stroke that rendered him unable to work, Annamae took jobs cleaning houses and offices to support her son’s education. Mother and son took care of Oscar until his death and continued to live together for the rest of Annamae’s life.

Throughout his working years and later retirement, Crite explored a variety of mediums for his art. In the 1930s and 1940s, while working for the Federal Art Project, a New Deal Program, he focused on oil painting and watercolors. In the 1950s, working as an engineering draftsman and technical illustrator for the Charlestown Navy Yard, Crite sought to produce art that could be more widely distributed. He bought a lithograph press and used it to produce multiple copies of his drawings. Aided by this new technology, Crite was able to distribute illustrated bulletins and pamphlets to churches, libraries, and schools across several states.

Crite also employed his lithograph press for more casual uses. Greenwald and Michelon’s introduction to the book recounts how Crite “would often make a number of sketches . . . at a dinner party and the next day share printed portraits of the attendees as a thank-you.”

The book covers the full body of Crite’s work, with particular attention to his paintings from the 1930s and 1940s, the Neighborhood Series, for their comprehensive and vivid depictions of Black life in Boston. Typically set on city streets with crowds of people (Crite admired Brueghel and excelled at presenting groups), these paintings exhibit a fascinating blend of stylization and realism, featuring scenes of children playing or leaving school, streetcorner preachers declaiming, congregants on their way to church, and parades. One scene of several people talking between two park benches is wryly titled Settling the World’s Problems (1933).

People in Crite’s urban scenes are not drawn in a wholly naturalistic way. Human figures appear stiff and artificially elongated – consider the wonderfully stretched legs of the drum major in Parade on Hammond Street (1935) – faces are relatively blank, with, at most, only subtle displays of emotion. The backdrops are somewhat flat, with buildings or other background features often seeming much closer to the people in the foreground than they would be in life.

Allan Rohan Crite, Parade on Hammond Street, 1935. Oil on canvas board, 18 x 24 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1942. Used by permission.

Despite these unnatural qualities, the neighborhood scenes are full of life. This liveliness comes partly from Crite’s rich colors: the red of bricks, the glowing storefronts, the yellows, greens, and blues of cars and women’s clothes that jump off the canvas.

The paintings also contain a variety of small details in the body language of their subjects that convey a sense of real human life. In Crite’s neighborhood paintings, people speak more eloquently through their bodies than their faces. In School’s Out (1936), two girls are clearly engaged in a squabble: one leans forward to berate the other, who leans back, one hand on a hip, in defiance, while a third girl stands to the side, regarding her feuding schoolmates, one hand in her pocket. And these three figures are not even the painting’s focal point, which overflows with dynamic individual scenes, each as arresting as the next.

Some of these compositions have a narrative quality. The Shower (1935) depicts kids in bathing suits cavorting beneath the spray of an open fire hydrant. About to pass in front of this scene are a mother and child, the painting’s two most distinctive and meticulously painted figures; the girl wears a collared red dress, while her mother, in spotless white, places her hands protectively on the girl’s shoulders. Why has Crite given such attention to these two passersby, even as they stand on the edge of his scene? Does the girl also want to play in the water, and only her mother is keeping her back? Perhaps, though she holds her mother’s protective hands with clear affection.

Allan Rohan Crite,The Shower, Ruggles St.1935, Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Boston Athenaeum.

Reproduced in full color, these paintings of city life are perhaps the book’s greatest strength. Art historian Julie Levin Caro’s essay is devoted entirely to this magnificent series, which she notes can be understood as a reflection of Crite’s relationship with the larger Black art world of his time. In the Neighborhood Series and similar works, Crite focused on everyday middle-class Black life, a subject he felt tended to be neglected artistically. Looking back on this period, Crite recalled:

The usual picture that one had [was of] the jazz person up in Harlem or of the sharecropper in the deep South. There was nothing in between – of just the ordinary middle-class person who goes to church, does the work, etc. What I decided to do back in those days … was just simply to record the life of Black people as I saw them.

Allan Rohan Crite, School's Out, 1936, oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Used by permission.

The book underlines Crite’s vision by providing contrasting examples of contemporary art by other Black artists, such as a nighttime street scene of Black Chicagoans by painter Archibald John Motley Jr., in which almost everyone is dancing or playing a musical instrument. This, and many other depictions by leading Harlem Renaissance artists such as Aaron Douglas and Hale Woodruff, presented Black culture in a way that Crite believed needed balancing out with his own approach.

After his neighborhood scenes, Crite’s most interesting work is his religious art; his paintings of Jesus, Mary, and other figures from Christian tradition are discussed in a chapter by Efeoghene Igor Coleman, a curator at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee.

Two distinctive features set off Crite’s religious paintings and drawings. First, he frequently portrayed holy figures as being Black. Paintings such as Our Lady of the Garden (1944), Groton Street, South End, Boston (1946), and Streetcar Madonna (1946), as well as many of his church bulletins, present a Black Jesus or Black Mary or both. In the 1980s, Crite would depart further from Western iconographic conventions, dressing Mary and Baby Jesus in traditional West African clothes in a bold assertion of Black dignity. As Crite in his later years, somewhat playfully reflected, “People were speaking about ‘Black is beautiful’ in the 1960s . . . and I’d been saying that since the 1930s.”

The other distinctive feature of Crite’s religious art is his penchant for placing religious figures in contemporary Bostonian settings. Groton Street, South End, Boston shows Mary and Baby Jesus hovering over the snow-covered city street, seemingly unnoticed by the pedestrians below. The Streetcar Madonna and the later series of West African Madonnas are placed on modern public transportation.

Cover of Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood Liturgy.

The combination of sacred figures and contemporary life could be a way of critiquing twentieth-century American society, and in many cases, this does seem to have been Crite’s intention. His involvement in church relief work, directed toward helping mostly Puerto Rican farmworkers, led him to create the lithograph Our Lady of the Migrant Workers/Nuestra Señora de los Braceros (1961), a scene showing a dark-skinned Holy Mother and Child against a backdrop of farm laborers.

In another reading, the use of sacred figures might be understood as a way of sanctifying the everyday. The apparition of Mary and Jesus above Groton Street, South End, Boston appears as an intrinsic, even ordinary element of neighborhood life, as much a part of the cityscape as the streetlamp or traffic sign. Crite’s own words about this are most poetic:

As the Gothic villager saw himself present at the Holy events, by means of the Arts of the Church, the altar paintings and all other media of expression, so that he identified himself with Our Lord’s life, so too, we today need the same type of message, that we may see a Nativity in our hills, a Miracle of Cana in our towns, a Calvary in our cities, and a Resurrection in our gardens and parks.

Of course, in many cases, Crite’s religious art can be understood as criticizing and sanctifying the present simultaneously. A “Calvary in our cities” is both a holy and ominous concept.

In her commentary on Streetcar Madonna, Coleman notes the contrast between the Black Jesus and Mary and the white passengers on the train, who seem to look disdainfully at the pair, while Mary only looks at her son with apparent concern. Coleman writes, “Depicting Mary as Black associates her with a group of mothers who are, tragically, more likely than parents of any other race to lose a child to state violence in America. . . . The knowledge that Jesus will die at the hands of the state echoes contemporary issues surrounding police brutality.”

As the first major book dedicated to Crite, Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood Liturgy is not without limitations. Many of the same facts and biographical details turn up in different essays, while other intriguing biographical details, such as Crite’s left-wing politics or his interest in non-Western cultures, are only alluded to. Yet as an important first step in elevating this underappreciated American artist, the book provides a valuable overview of Crite’s life and an outstanding presentation of his art. It is a good introduction to the work of a gifted man who brought to life the beauty and divinity he saw in the communities around him.