Allan Rohan Crite: Madonna of the Subway Series

As part of the city wide celebration of SMFA alumnus Allan Rohan Crite (1910–2007) (BFA’36), including presentations at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Boston Athenaeum, Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) is pleased to present our recent acquisition of his iconic print series Madonna of the Subway. 

Created in the 1980s, these lithographs originate from Crite’s 1946 painting Madonna of the Subway, featuring a Black Virgin Mary and Christ Child riding Boston’s Orange Line. Crite revisited the subject forty years later in a series of lithographs that depict a Madonna and Child in African dress, placed within shared city life, such as riding the T or waiting at a train station. A devout Episcopalian, Crite used religious themes throughout his works. In this series, he reimagines biblical figures as Black. Combining the sacred and the ordinary, the series reflects Crite’s lifelong dedication to capturing the African American experience in Boston.  

Allan Rohan Crite was born in New Jersey, and raised and spent the duration of his life in Boston, attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts where he graduated in 1936. That same year, his work was shown in the exhibition New Horizons in American Art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. During the 1930s, Crite participated in the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a program that aided artists during the Depression. While participating in the FAP, Crite created his “neighborhood paintings,” depicting Boston’s predominantly African American Roxbury district.  

Image: Allan Rohan Crite, Madonna of the Subway - family and train front March 1987. Multilith print. 11 x 17 in. Tufts University Permanent Collection: Gallery Purchase. Photographic scan by Sarah Gurney.