Allan Rohan Crite - by Diana Seave Greenwald & Christina Michelon (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The first major book about an artist of powerful significance to twentieth-century Black and American art

The artist Allan Rohan Crite (1910-2007) was a community leader, mentor, and tireless recorder of the people and places of Boston, where he lived for the better part of a century. Before the age of forty, he had exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, sold work to the important collector Duncan Phillips, and earned the respect of fellow Black artists around the country. But Crite's decision to stay in Boston and his commitment to depicting middle class Black life and religious subjects relegated him to the margins of art histories that put the Harlem Renaissance at the center. Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood Liturgy, the first major book dedicated to this important artist, is a richly illustrated and wide-ranging celebration of a figure whose vast body of work deserves a much broader audience.

Crite trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and became a self-described "artist-reporter," drawing and painting vivid scenes of everyday life in Roxbury, the South End, and other Boston neighborhoods, while grappling with the ways they were transformed in the second half of the century by "urban renewal," gentrification, and changing demographics. Working in oil, watercolor, lithography, book illustration, and beyond, he incorporated spiritual themes in his work throughout his career, blurring the secular and the sacred.

Featuring essays by leading scholars of African American art, Black intellectual history, and urban studies, as well as oral histories by contemporary artists and Crite's friends, Allan Rohan Crite reveals the radical power of Crite's art and its profound influence on generations of artists, activists, and community leaders.

Distributed for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Exhibition Schedule
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
October 23, 2025-January 19, 2026

Boston Athenaeum
October 15, 2025-January 24, 2026

Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
February 4, 2026-July 31, 2026

About the Author

Diana Greenwald is the William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Her books include Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art (Princeton). Christina Michelon is the Pamela and Peter Voss Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Paula Austin is director of graduate studies and associate professor of history and African American & Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University and the author of Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life. Julie Caro is head of learning and engagement at the Asheville Museum of Art in Asheville, North Carolina, and the author of Allan Rohan Crite: Artist-Reporter of the African American Community. Efe Igor Coleman is a doctoral candidate at Yale University. Arielle Gray is a reporter at WBUR in Boston. Theodore Landsmark is Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and director of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.