Boston National Historical ParkPage 152 of 170
Allan Rohan Crite: The Artist in the Shipyard
By day, Allan Rohan Crite was an engineering draftsman and technical illustrator at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston, through World War II and for decades after. The rest of the time he was an artist whom one art historian ranked among the few true masters of his generation, and a lay pastoral leader in the Episcopal Church. Boston National Historical Park tells his story.
Early years
Crite was born in 1910 in Plainfield, New Jersey, the only child of a middle-class family. That same year his father, Oscar Crite, took an engineering job in Boston, and the family moved. Crite spent most of his life in Lower Roxbury and the South End, an ethnically diverse part of the city. In later life he recorded several oral histories, one of them with Boston National Historical Park, in which he comes across as warm, engaging and funny.
His mother and teachers were encouraging his art by the time he was six; his mother, Annamae, remembered him drawing whenever he wasn't eating. At 16 he won his first drawing prize, and after high school he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on a scholarship.
The artist
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1929 | First public exhibition, at age 19 |
| 1936 | Graduated from the Museum School; joined the WPA Federal Art Project |
| Early 1940s | Harvard University Press published two books of his illustrations of African American spirituals |
| 1948–1950 | Church interiors for the Rambush Decorating Company of New York |
| 1955 onward | More than 1,200 monthly church bulletins over 30-plus years, made and mailed at his own expense |
| 1995 | Last book, fifteen engravings of The Revelation of Saint John the Divine |
The WPA's Federal Art Project supported artists through the Depression; the paintings Crite made for it became government property, and some are now at the Smithsonian.
Crite said his main aim was to show African Americans living ordinary lives. His best-known works are the more than 35 street scenes he painted around his neighborhood. He worked in oil, watercolor, ink brush, lithography, linoleum block and graphite, exhibited across the country for nearly eighty years, and often gave his work away: the Boston Athenaeum holds more than seventy pieces, all his gifts.
Calling himself a "liturgical artist," Crite became one of the best-known artists in the Episcopal Church, and lectured on religious art at churches across the country. His largest work, a 345-square-foot mural for St. Augustine's Church in Brooklyn, was destroyed by fire in 1972; he also did smaller church projects in Detroit and Washington, D.C.
The draftsman
In the late 1930s Crite turned to public service to earn a living: about a year as a mapmaker for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, then, from 1941 to 1974, the Boston Naval Shipyard.
Crite's perspective drawing of the propeller system for USS Patterson, 1972. His drawings were essential to Navy shipbuilders. Boston National Historical Park, BOST 13879.
He drew the propulsion systems that drive ships, and his perspective drawings helped shipbuilders picture new designs; he later said no one else in the yard did that kind of work. He also drew for The Shipyard News, the yard's newspaper, and made safety and other public-service signs.
Crite's cartoons rallied workers behind safety, cost-cutting and conservation. This one reads: "Santa Claus has come again with reindeer and sleigh full of toys but let us remember we should maintain a clean shipyard which will mean many joys." Boston National Historical Park.
After the war, with fewer ships needed, the Navy laid off many workers, Crite three times, once for as long as a year. He used those furloughs for his Rambush church commissions. Meanwhile he spent fourteen years at night school at the Harvard Extension School, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Extension Studies in 1968; his Design Department colleagues gave him the traditional "Harvard chair."
Crite (left) and Design Department colleagues saying goodbye to a coworker (center), early 1970s. Boston National Historical Park, BOST 7646-1.
Racial discrimination at the shipyard was known. But in a 1984 Boston Globe interview Crite said he felt highly respected there: colleagues knew his religious work and thought of him simply as someone who happened to be Black. When the yard closed for good in 1974, he semi-retired and worked part-time as a librarian at Harvard's Grossman Library.
Crite's bird's-eye view of proposed changes to the shipyard's South Boston Annex, 1969. Boston National Historical Park, BOST 13344-5.
Legacy
Elma Lewis, founder of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, credited Crite with celebrating the Black community in the 1930s and 1940s, when very few others did. Artists he mentored called him the Dean of African American artists in New England.
- Awards included the Massachusetts Cultural Council's Commonwealth Award and Harvard's Centennial Medal, plus honorary doctorates from four schools.
- More than 100 institutions hold his work.
- In 1986 Boston dedicated Allan Rohan Crite Park on Columbus Avenue, near his home. The same year he married Jackie Cox, who has catalogued and preserved thousands of his works and organized many retrospectives.
- In 2003 Boston National Historical Park mounted an exhibit on his shipyard career in its visitor center, and Crite, then 93, came to see it. He died in 2007.
The plaque at the site of his South End home calls him a "Master Visual Artist, Painter, Printmaker, Author, Lecturer, Historian, and Good Neighbor." NPS photo / Parrow.
Sources
Based on "Allan Rohan Crite: The Artist in the Shipyard," Boston National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.