WGBH, December 2025
When Allan Rohan Crite was a boy, his mother Annamae would take him on trips to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where he would create sketches from his memories.
Now, 18 years after the Boston native’s death, Crite’s work is finally hanging in that museum, a sign of well-deserved recognition of his role as a long-underappreciated laureate of Black artistry.
“Allan was documenting his neighborhood and his neighbors and his spiritual activity,” said Ted Landsmark, co-curator of the Gardner’s new retrospective “Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory.”
“He gave me a much clearer sense of the underlying spirit that existed within Boston’s African-American community.”
“Urban Glory” runs through Jan. 19 alongside another Crite exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum, where the artist donated much of his work in 1971. “Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston” runs through Jan. 24. Both exhibitions highlight the artist, not just as an innovative painter, drafter, historian and poet, but as a neighborhood father figure who merged the spirituality of Black Madonnas with the everyday bustle of streetcars.
