Allan Rohan Crite’s oil painting Front of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Tremont Street (1936) depicts a bustling moment on the sidewalk, with people making their way around downtown Boston. It is a multiracial scene; each person is well dressed, seemingly on their way to somewhere important. No face looks desultory or downtrodden, despite it being in the midst of the Great Depression. Crite captures the block’s layers of architecture with exquisite care, offering two small triangles of blue sky above the Episcopal cathedral that accentuate the way it is sandwiched between two much taller buildings, a somewhat awkward yet charmingly Bostonian architectural look. Painted in 1936, decades before I was born, the painting records a timeless energy of the space—evoking my own memories of passing this very church on my way to Lambert’s Marketplace. My grandfather, my sisters, and I would buy bags of peanuts there and take them across the street to the Boston Common to feed pigeons and squirrels. Routinely, we would drive by the Shaw memorial on the opposite side of the Common on our way home to Cambridge—another Boston landmark Crite would render in Meeting at St. Gaudens Shaw Memorial (1944), using watercolor on paper.
Crite (1910–2007), the famed artist, mentor, and resident of Boston’s South End neighborhood, is the subject of a crosstown retrospective. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, not far from where Crite lived, the Hostetter and Fenway galleries respectively host “Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory” and “Visions of Black Madonnas,” curated by Diana Seave Greenwald in partnership with Theodore Landsmark (both on view October 23, 2025–January 19, 2026), while the Boston Athenaeum simultaneously hosts “Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston,” curated by Christina Michelon (on view October 23, 2025–January 24, 2026). Collectively, these exhibitions—and ample related shows and events that engage his many mentees—evince the intensity of Crite’s prolific practice and the countless ways his spirit and influence carry through Boston and beyond. Spread across each exhibition site are entryways into his oeuvre through scenes that are reportive yet memoiric, divine yet ordinary, local and contemporary, global and ancient, across media ranging from singular watercolor, gouache, and oil painting to sketches and lithographs reproduced by the artist himself in mass quantity.
Installation view, “Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory,” in Hostetter Gallery, October 23, 2025–January 19, 2026. Courtesy of Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
It is felicitous to witness Crite’s work within places he was known to love. Upstairs in the Hostetter Gallery at the Gardner, the show opens with an introduction to Crite’s work that samples its scope—two self-portraits, an oil painting of Lower Roxbury, a watercolor of a crowded train car, explorative drawings of African sculptures, a series of illustrations of Black spirituals titled Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven (1937), and the iconic Streetcar Madonna (1936)—before turning toward the artist’s legacy and relationships with other artists in his community. The Fenway Gallery focuses exclusively on depictions of Black Madonnas, situating Crite within centuries of history. At the Athenaeum, special attention is paid to the artist’s works on paper to anchor him as a keeper of knowledge of Boston’s history. Throughout his work at each site, Black epistemologies are prominent subjects and methods in Crite’s artistic practice, as seen in his paintings of his community from the first half of the twentieth century and through the lithography that dominates the latter half…