25 Facts About Wally Hedrick

Wally Bill Hedrick was a seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s.

Wally Hedrick was a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading, and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam.

Wally Hedrick came out of the military and car culture, first glimpsing the liberating promise of San Francisco bohemia in the late 1940s, then moving to the city permanently after seeing combat in the Korean War.

Wally Hedrick visited California School of Fine Arts in 1946.

Wally Hedrick made these paintings and while he would paint the musicians would play along with him.

Wally Hedrick would go like this and they would go doodoo doop.

Wally Hedrick made an early break with the conventions of art training and art-making.

At the time, Wally Hedrick was one of the first San Francisco artists in the early 1950s to work almost exclusively with metal.

Wally Hedrick began welding in 1952, and these efforts are considered the first kinetic-junk assemblages.

Wally Hedrick made assemblages and sculptures from beer cans, lights, broken radio and television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines he found in junkyards.

Wally Hedrick was particularly pleased when he could fix an abandoned appliance sufficiently that at least some piece of it would work and he could turn his assemblages into moving sculptures.

In 1951, during the Korean War, Wally Hedrick was drafted into the United States Army against his will, escorted away by US Army MPs without even having the chance to call his parents.

Wally Hedrick served Garcia as a model not only as a painter but as an expositor of a way of life.

Wally Hedrick thought Garcia bright and hip, and advised Garcia to attend poetry readings at the North Beach coffee houses, such as the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, the social centre of the Beat community.

Vesuvio Cafe employed Wally Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings.

Wally Hedrick approached Ginsberg in mid-1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery.

Wally Hedrick met artist Jay DeFeo, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and they married in 1954.

Wally Hedrick included Hedrick in the 1959 Sixteen Americans show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, NY.

Wally Hedrick, knowing full well the importance of being on hand for the opening, gave his plane ticket for the New York museum exhibition and spectacle to friends, rather than participate.

Not only did Wally Hedrick not attend the 1959 Sixteen Americans opening at the Museum of Modern Art or even go to see the exhibition, he further distanced himself from the mainstream art world by declaring that artists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell were too firmly rooted in formal traditions.

In 1959, again recalling his Asian military experience, Wally Hedrick painted "Anger", the first artistic denunciation of American policy in Vietnam.

Wally Hedrick took "about 50" of his early canvases and painted them black.

On December 17,2003, Wally Hedrick died of congestive heart failure at his home in Sonoma County at the age of 75.

Wally Hedrick was a forerunner of Pop Art, Bad Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation.

Wally Hedrick's students included Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, William Wiley, Robert H Hudson, Angela Conte model for many of his female figurtive works of the 1980's and 90's, William Allen and Mike Henderson.