And his situation at 90 years of age, the roof crumbling over his head, makes the lesson a sad one. It's a tragedy for any black artist in America in the '30s and '40s, when there never was any real recognition. And we're still not there yet. When we finally judge him just as an artist, not as a black artist, I think then we'll have done something. We don't live life in compartments.
Life is a continuous stream.
All the sketches, the icons, the portraits, the diptychs, the lithographs, they're all part of that single stream, that single story, for Crite. I regard everything I've done since age six as part of one work. And I'll stop working on it only when I die. Last spring, Mr. Crite delivered a lecture on his art at Harvard University. This article appeared in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine on July 16, 2000.