page_title: Allan Crite
section_title: Artwork
hierarchical_section_title: Allan Crite / Artwork
context_page_description: Allan Rohan Crite was a Boston-based African American artist. He won several honors, such as the 350th Harvard University Anniversary Medal.
context_section_description: Crite hoped to depict the life of African-Americans living in Boston in a new and different way: as ordinary citizens or the "middle class" rather than stereotypical jazz musicians or sharecroppers. Through his art, he intended to tell the story of African Americans as part of the fabric of American society and its reality. By using representational style rather than modernism, Crite felt that he could more adequately "report" and capture the reality that African Americans were part of but often unaccounted for.
  Crite explained his body of work as having a common theme:
  I've only done one piece of work in my whole life and I am still at it. I wanted to paint people of color as normal humans.  I tell the story of man through the black figure.
  His paintings fall into two categories: religious themes and general African-American experiences with some reviewers adding a third category for work depicting Negro spirituals. Spirituals, he believed, expressed a certain humanity. Crite was a devout Episcopalian, and his religion inspired many of his works. His 1946 painting Madonna of the Subway is an example of a blend of genres, depicting a Black Holy Mother and baby Jesus riding Boston's Orange Line. Other pieces such as School's Out (1936) reflect on the themes of community, family, society. On his faith and the role of liturgy in his pieces, Crite said in an interview:
  It was very useful, because it gave me a framework of discipline within which to do my work. So I used that, for example, as the frame of discipline to illustrate the spirituals, by making use of the liturgy, the vestments, and everything like that -- using the vestments and appurtenances as, you might say, a vocabulary.
  His work is recognizable to the use of rich earth tone colors. According to one biographer, his favorite color was "all colors" and his favorite time of year was "anything but winter." According to one reviewer, "Crite's oils and graphics, even when restricted to black and white, are bright in tonality, fine and varied in line, extremely rhythmic, dramatic in movement, and often patterned."
  Crite's works hang in more than a hundred American institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute and Washington’s Phillips Collection. The Boston Athenaeum holds the largest public collection of his paintings and watercolors, a bequest from Crite in gratitude for his long tenure there as a visiting artist.
caption: Douglass Square, Boston, by Allan Crite. Oil. 20" x 24". 1936. Commissioned by the Federal Arts Project.
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