"Allan Rohan Crite"(March 20, 1910-September 6, 2007.

Allan mother encouraged her son to draw to keep him busy while she wrote poetry.Her support led Allan to become arguably the important African-American artist in native New England.His work explored Negro spirituals and religious themes,and documented the African-American experience.Allan remained in Boston,where he grew up,and graduated from Harvard,wrote several books,and received numerous honorary degrees.He and his wife established a museum of his countless pencil sketches,lithographs,brush-and-ink drawings,and oil paintings,but pieces of his work were also held by some of the nation's most prestigious museums.However,despite his impressive body of work,Allan was nearly destitute by his nineties.Several academics,curators,and artists sang Allan praises,but he was generally unknown.All was born in Planfield New Jersey.The only child of Oscar William Crite, a medical student who later became a an electrical engineer ,and Annamae Crite,a homemaker and unpublished poet.During World War 1,while Allan was still a child the family moved to Boston modest,middle-class south side neighborhood.Upon their arrival in Boston,Annamae began taking humanities classes at Harvard University Extension School,and encouraged her son to sketch and draw,keeping him occupied while she wrote poetry.Because he was a quiet child,several of his teachers wanted to place him in a "special class for people who were not right in the head,"he recalled in an interview found at Boston.com.But when one of Allan school teachers told Annamae that she thought Allan had artistic talent,Annamae listened.She enrolled him in Charles Herbert Woodbury's Children's Art Center.After graduating from Boston English High School in 1929,He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts on scholarship,where he studied for six years.Also in 1929,as he was becoming known as an artist,his father was injured in an accident at work.Until his father died,eight years,later,All helped his mother care for him.In the 1930's,Allan spent a year as a Works Projects Administration artist,and briefly was a member of the Society of Independent Artists,a Boston collective.In 1940,he took a job as a draftsman for the Boston Ship Yard, a job he kept for 30 years.He illustrated ships and machines built at the yard.He later attended Boston University,the Massachusetts College of Art,and Harvard,where an academic prize was named for him.He also worked part-time in Harvard library for 20 years.Allan separated his artwork into three distinct categories:His Negro spirituals illustrations, his religious-themed work,and his neighborhood paintings.With his illustrations,his religious-themed work,and his neighborhood paintings.With his illustrations of Negro spirituals,Allan whose grandfather was a slave,sought to tell the story and meaning of the songs,which he felt was being lost.He also published two books of pen-and-ink drawings that explored the Negro spiritual,Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?and Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven.A substantial portion of His work was devoted to exploring the non-European aspects of the Bible,with its African,Asian,and Middle-Eastern references.He painted triptychs and altars,and designed and painted vestments and banners for St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Cambridge,Massachusetts.A highly detailed altar he built in 1940 was used in both Episcopalian and Roman Catholic services, and featured a black christ child and multinational,and multiracial angels and onlookers.In the fifties and sixties, He lectured on religious art at seminaries around the United States and in Europe.As a self-described "artist reporter," in his "neighborhood paintings," as he called them in Artsfirst online,Allan captured images of "ordinary Black people,living ordinary lives"in paintings of people he knew in street scenes.One of his best-known paintings,Harriet and Leon,featured a black couple walking past the curious stares of two children in an unspecified neighborhood.According to Allan,Harriet ans Leon,painted in 1941,was meant to show a black man and woman,not as jazz muscians or sharecroppers,but as dignified ordinarypeople."He had the courage to celebrate art about black people when it wasn't celebrated," artist Paul Goodnight told the Boston Globe.In 1968,He earned a bachelor's degree from the Harvard Extension School. Allan and his mother,whom he continued to live with and care for,moved from his childhood home into a 150-year-old townhouse on Columbus Avenue,just seven block away, in 1971. She died six years later, But he remained in the old house. During the eighties, Allan accumulated honorary doctorates from Suffolk University,Emmanuel College,and Massachusetts College of Art.In 1986 a parcel of land at a corner near his house was named for him,and Harvard honored him with its 350th anniversary medal.Also in the late eighties,Allan helped found The Boston Collective with several other local artists. He was an intriguing character in the group,known to drop French or Spanish words into conversation.He was also known for being interested in discussing a variety of topics,ranging from black migration and the geography of the Bible,he current news or political topics like abortion.A mong his fellow artists,Allan was known as the group's "surrogate father," according to the Boston Globe.Massachusetts state representative suggested to Allan that he open a museum for his work.Allan,who was never interested in any type of self promotion,sat on the idea.It wasn't until his wife Jackie, that the museum began to take shape.Jackie,an art consultant half his age whom he married in 1993,was bent on preserving His work.She converted his cluttered townhouse into the Critepaniels once were part of a Cambridge monastery, but were returned to their creator,and they were kept in the museum,too.