Cary Selden Rodman (February 19, 1909 – November 2, 2002) was a prolific American writer of poetry, plays and prose, political commentary, art criticism, Latin American and Caribbean history, biography and travel writing—publishing a book almost every year of his adult life, he also co-edited Common Sense magazine.
[2][5] Regarding self-taught, naïve, and primitive artists he admired, Rodman said, '...by their intuitive grasp of the principles of composition, color, and accommodation to the flatness of the picture-plane, (they) achieve the same quality of timelessness as the Masters.
Working alongside DeWitt Peters, founder of the Centre d' Art, Rodman initiated and directed the mural paintings in the Episcopal Cathedral Ste.
While writing a series of travel and history books in the 1960s and 1970s, Rodman visited Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean, adding works of popular art to his collection.
In 1983 Ramapo College in Mahwah, NJ, accepted the gift of The Selden Rodman Collection of Popular Art whose range included 'self-taught' and 'outsider' artists from North America as well.
[8] Several of Rodman's books were collections of conversations he had with literary and art figures of his time, including, among many others, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer in Tongues of Fallen Angels, and Joseph Glasco, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Leonard Baskin and others in Conversations with Artists.
His journals, dating from 1938 to 2000, contain handwritten accounts of his personal life, travels, and conversations with writers and artists which were later used for many published works.
[9] Throughout his life and writings, Rodman fiercely argued for artists to search '...for images of truth that will be meaningful to his contemporaries.'