Allan Crite

Showing promise at a young age, he enrolled in the Children's Art Centre at United South End Settlements in Boston and graduated from the English High School in 1929.

In 1986, Boston named the intersection of Columbus Avenue and West Canton Street, steps from his home, Allan Rohan Crite Square.

[9] 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"[3] rather than stereotypical jazz musicians or sharecroppers.

[5] 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[5] but often unaccounted for.

[11][12] 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.

"[2] 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.

[14] 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.