Wally Hedrick
Encyclopedia
Wally Bill Hedrick was a seminal American artist
in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s. Hedrick’s contributions to art include pioneering artworks in psychedelic light art, mechanical kinetic sculpture, junk/assemblage sculpture, Pop Art, and (California) Funk Art. Later in his life, he was a recognized forerunner in Happenings, Conceptual Art, Bad Painting
, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation. Hedrick was also 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 was known as an “idea artist” long before the label “conceptual art” entered the art world, and experimented with innovative use of language in art, at times resorting to puns.
(1950–1953). Hedrick visited California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute
) in 1946. During this period, he joined Progressive Art Workers with David Simpson, John Stanley and others. The Progressive Art Workers was a social club which also functioned as a co-operative through which the group the members were able to exhibit their works. At this time, too, Vesuvio's bar in San Francisco's North Beach district hired Hedrick as an action painter to work (i.e. 'make paintings') while a jazz combo performed:
Hedrick made an early break with the conventions of art training and art—making. "There were three directions an artist could take at that time," Hedrick says, "Figuration, Abstract-Expressionism. And this third thing, which was out of the surrealist and Dada tradition." Hedrick began "working out a form of personalized Dada", which led "perhaps to his most influential contribution to the course of Bay Area art: an elaborate kind of punning. The puns not only became titles...but appeared in the painting itself."
Hedrick's mature artistic career began with paintings of popular imagery—American flags, radios, television cabinets and refrigerators—years before the rise of New York Pop Art
. John Coplans
included Hedrick's use of popular imagery in 1951 in his timeline of the antecedents to Pop Art. Hedrick "began painting flags in the 1950s, before New York's Jasper Johns did. Soon after, Hedrick -- ever the anti-careerist -- painted many of those flags black to protest the Vietnam War."
In the early 1950s, Vesuvio’s bar, a popular Beat hangout, employed Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings. Hedrick's figure, therefore, helped ushered in the Beat lifestyle which ballooned in the later 1950s; by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene. Hedrick once confided to his student Jerry Garcia
that "he and his friends were the real Beat Generation."
At the time, Hedrick was one of the first San Francisco Artists in the early 1950s to work almost exclusively with metal. He began welding in 1952, and these efforts are considered the first kinetic / junk assemblages. Hedrick made assemblages and sculptures from beer cans, lights, broken radio and television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines he found in junkyards. "What interests me", he said later, is "to take garbage and make it into art, kind of ironic art." He painted over the surfaces with thick layers of impasto and gesso which incorporated the work into the aesthetic of action painting. He 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.
Although using beer cans was popularized in 1960 by Jasper Johns
, Hedrick began the practice in art many years earlier, during the early 1950s. One of Hedrick's favorite beer can sculptures "was made up of smashed beer cans in a kind of pyramid, as sort of a mountain, so I called it American Everest." The welded beer can sculptures "carried over until -- 1969."
During the 1950s, Hedrick's efforts followed two main paths: painting and sculpture. More specifically, between 1952 - 1958, Hedrick begins his kenetic junk assemblages, beer can sculptures and 'Black Painting' series. Not only do Hedrick's junk kenetic beer can sculptures, now all lost or destroyed, possibly rank as the seminal "kinetic junk sculptures...made before Tinguely", but also, Hedrick is one of the first American artists to oppose US intervention in South Vietnam.
"was one of Wally's greatest gods, always."
, 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 must have been a problem for them, though, because Wally didn't ever do military things quite the way they intended...you told Wally not to do it, that's what he would do. He was stationed in Korea
until 1952. During this time, his paintings and assemblages shifted from neo-cubism to metaphysics to political subjects painted in a cartoonish style and dealing particularly with the escalation of the Vietnam War.
in the late 1940s by two members of the Bay Area figurative painters David Park and Elmer Bischoff.
contrasts this work with Jasper Johns
’s "anonymous stenciling", drawing attention to the way Hedrick mimics the flamboyant calligraphy found in the decoration of hot-rod cars. Crow sees the work in contrast to Johns’s reticence, as a protest aimed against the waste of lives in Korea, and at Cold War
adventurism in general. Additionally, Peace (1953), "demonstrates an intuitive understanding of 'language as symbol' which predates the present postmodern use (of language) by twenty years. Hedrick’s pre-pop paintings were included in John Coplan’s historical “Pop Art, USA," the first exhibition to attempt a collective look at the movement in the United States, presented at the Oakland Art Museum during September, 1963. Even after his Pop Art phase, Hedrick continued "his risk-taking forays into regions where, mostly, angels fear to tread",.
In the late 1940s he experimented with light. By 1953 he had created a “light machine” that combined keyboard, glass, speakers, and homemade projectors and colored lights that responded to changes in pitch, register, and volume, which was an early precursor of the psychedelic light shows of the '60s -- and years before the light shows of Haight-Ashbury.
of The Grateful Dead studied with Wally Hedrick and Elmer Bischoff at San Francisco Art Institute
. It was the only school Garcia would ever be proud of attending. Hedrick served Garcia as a model not only as a painter but as an expositor of a way of life. To Garcia, Hedrick was a genuine beatnik. 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. It was Hedrick who turned the young Garcia on to acoustic blues and Jack Kerouac
’s On the Road and all its attendant attitudes. On the Road changed Garcia’s life forever. “Wally taught me that art is not only something you do, but something you are.”
In fact, as "a genuine beatnik" Hedrick was employed at a 'beatnik' bohemian sitting at the bar at Vesuvios, a famous hangout in San Francisco’s North Beach. Vesuvio’s employed Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings. Hedrick's figure, therefore, helped ushered in the Beat lifestyle which ballooned in the later 1950s; by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene.
Although Hedrick once confided to his student Jerry Garcia
that "he and his friends were the real Beat Generation, the seminal visual artists in the 1950s in San Francisco, including Hedrick, shunned the ‘beatnik’ label. None of them liked being called “Beats” and they especially abhorred the label “Beatniks,” a sobriquet of disparagement coined by San Francisco’s famed columnist Herb Caen
. As Bruce Conner
stated: “I don’t know any artist that would call himself a beat artist…If somebody did, you’d consider him a fake, a fraud running a scam.”
Made from what was known as the King Ubu Gallery ("an all poet thing"), in 1954, Hedrick co-founded The Six Gallery in San Francisco, California
with David Simpson, Hayward King, John Allen Ryan, Deborah Remington
and Jack Spicer
-- and by 1955, had "become the official director". Although "the activities of the "6" were poorly documented", the Six Gallery functioned as an underground art gallery
for the members and a meeting place for poets and literati alike. "The Six" was a focal point for countercultural activity during a crucial transition point—unconventional artists were deep underground—partly because no audience enouraged them to emerge, partly because it was safer there. "The Six" delighted at the chance to defy authority. As the gallery director, Hedrick organized and participated in the spontaneous exhibition/poetry reading/performance events that were the precursors of the 'Happenings' of the 1960s.
In the wake of the artist collective galleries such as Ubu and Six came galleries run by professionals.
"Hedrick was instrumental in transforming the cheery satire of Pop Art
into the more outrageous bite of funk art." The birth of 'California Funk Art' can be found at the Six Gallery. Robert Arneson
, the so-called "Father of the Ceramic Funk Art movement". considered Hedrick, "The Godfather of Funk Art".
Hedrick received his B.F.A.
in Art from the San Francisco Art Institute
in 1955.
"The Six Gallery reading
" took place on October 7, 1955 at the Six Gallery, when Allen Ginsberg
, at Hedrick's invitation, read "Howl
" for the first time. The event has become nearly as much a part of the city's mystique as the 1849 Gold Rush or the 1906 earthquake.
Hedrick approached Ginsberg in mid-1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery. At first, Ginsberg refused, but once he’d written a rough draft of Howl
, he changed his mind. An account of the night can be found in Jack Kerouac
's novel The Dharma Bums
, where he describes collecting change from each audience member to buy jugs of wine with Hedrick.
Hedrick's 'Six Gallery Reading' was the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation and helped to herald the West Coast artistic revolution that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance
.
, a student at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and they married in 1954. Jay DeFeo
's best-known painting, "The Rose", was made in their Filmore Street apartment, took almost eight years to create and weighs 2,300 pounds, all paid for by her husband, Wally Hedrick.
In 1958 one of his mechanical assemblages "attacked" a woman at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
's annual Christmas party and holiday exhibition. His "Xmas Tree" was "sort of the pinnacle of the kinetic junk sculptures because I'd never attempted anything so complicated", built out of "two radios, two phonographs, flashing lights, electric fans, saw motor--all controlled by timers, hooked so [they] would cycle all these things." One of the record players played "I Hate to See Christmas Come Around." At the opening, which Hedrick refused to attend, he set a timer so that the piece "suddenly began flashing its lights, honking its horns, and playing its records." One woman who was standing next to the piece when it suddenly turned on found her fur coat tangled in it and then received an electrical shock. "It caused quite a sensation not because of its artistic merit, but because it attacked this lady, which I thought was very nice... I wasn't making it as an art thing. I was more interested in making a "thing", and if it attacked people—well I guess I knew it was going to attack...I knew it would probably attack because I laid the trap. So it entertained me; I thought the evening was a success."
in New York
, NY. Most of the participants in this now infamous exhibition have since become firmly placed in the pantheon of Pop Art
, Minimal Art and Contemporary Art
: for example Hedrick's then wife, Jay DeFeo
, Jasper Johns
, Ellsworth Kelly
, Robert Rauschenberg
, and Frank Stella
. 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. It would be 25 years before Hedrick figured prominently again in New York
, during the Whitney Museum of American Art
’s, Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965 exhibition in 1995.
Not only did 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. Instead, Hedrick asserted, “You’ve got to have a deep sense of the human and you have to have a political stance. Painting is not above politics. Anything that has to do with the soul also has to do with the stomach.
In 1959, again recalling his Asian military experience, Hedrick painted "Anger" (or "Madame Nhu’s Bar-B-Q"), the first artistic denunciation of American policy in Vietnam
. Anger, visually equates an act of forceful sexual penetration with corrupt political manipulation. Explosive rage and indignation are symbolized by an atomic cloud serving double duty as the form of male and female genitalia perpetrating the deed."
In 1959, both Hedrick and DeFeo became an original members of Bruce Conner
's Rat Bastard Protective Association
The Black Paintings were Hedrick's protest against the Vietnam War. Hedrick took "about 50" of his early canvases and painted them black. Hedrick's Black Paintings culminate in 1967 with "War Room". This series "was an idiosyncratic protest, but a passionate one."
is "a group of four eleven-by-eleven foot black canvases, each filling a wall of the room" then arranged "into a square...in the shape of a room...and a door to go in it." The installation has been described as a significant item of Bay Area art history.
During this time, Hedrick was accused of stealing paintings, including a canvas by Clyfford Still
, from the San Francisco Art Institute
, where he was teaching, then either painting them black or painting his own iconoclastic pictures over them.
Wally Hedrick: The Dark Millenium, by Gina Dorré and LG Williams, is an in-depth account of The War Room and Black Painting Series between 1953-2003.
In December 2008, Christopher Miles, art critic for the LA Weekly, nominated the War Room (exhibited at Mara McCarthy's The Box, March 21 - April 26,) for Best Show of the Year (2008).
Also, in December 2008, Walead Beshty, art critic for Artforum Magazine, nominated the War Room (exhibited at Mara McCarthy's The Box, March 21 - April 26) among the most notable Los Angeles exhibitions in 2008.
In the early 1970s Hedrick was fired from a teaching post at the San Francisco Art Institute
, after circulating a petition protesting America's presence in Vietnam.
After the dismissal Hedrick began a period of self-imposed artistic exile, devoting most of his time to operating a home repair business (appropriately named, "Wally's Fix-It Shop") in the town of San Geronimo, California
. This is an example of the way Hedrick "operates outside the busy highway of contemporary art". The small repair business proved moderately successful. Hedrick's repair skills were first recognized during the Korean War, when he was given the task of fixing radios.
His paintings of the 1970s were mainly crude black and white renditions of old mail order catalogue illustrations.
Hedrick recycled the Black paintings -- recycling being another recurring theme in his work -- during the Persian Gulf War
, slathering the older black paintings them with new statements in white acrylic paint
like, "So damn, whose sane?".
, Hedrick returned to making all-black paintings.
As early as 1963, John Coplans, the future editor of Artforum Magazine (January 1972–January 1977), would confess the "fashionable world of contemporary painting" (i.e. East Coast) unpleasant reaction to the independent, offensive, 35 year old Hedrick: "there is little doubt that Hedrick is an original, yet the fashionable world of contemporary painting tends to reject Wally Hedrick's work out of hand." Its no surprise, therefore, “the pathos of Hedrick’s situation was that few not already converted were ever likely to witness Hedrick’s accomplishments." William T. Wiley
described Hedrick as "amazing".
The cultural historian Rebecca Solnit in her 1990 book, The Secret Exhibition: Six Californian Artists, reasserted Hedrick’s artistic achievements:
"Maybe the most important thing about Wally is that he could have been so rich and so successful and so famous," said Professor Rollison, a colleague of Hedrick's at The College of Marin
.
, Whitney Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
, and The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum
. His work resides in public collections which include The Smithsonian Institution, The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
, and The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum
.
Hedrick taught at the San Francisco Art Institute
"shortly after graduating (from SFAI). In 1959 he also stopped teaching as a form of protest against the war, and was eventually fired." Later, Hedrick taught at San Francisco Academy of Art, San Francisco State University
, University of California at Davis, San Jose State University
and the College of Marin
, where he held Professor Emeritus status. His students included Jerry Garcia
of the Grateful Dead
http://biography.jrank.org/pages/3611/Garcia-Jerry-1942-1995-Musician-Traded-in-Accordion-Guitar.html, William Wiley
, Robert H. Hudson
, William Allen
and Mike Henderson.
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s. Hedrick’s contributions to art include pioneering artworks in psychedelic light art, mechanical kinetic sculpture, junk/assemblage sculpture, Pop Art, and (California) Funk Art. Later in his life, he was a recognized forerunner in Happenings, Conceptual Art, Bad Painting
Bad Painting
"Bad" Painting is the name given to a trend in American figurative painting in the 1970s by critic and curator, Marcia Tucker . She curated an exhibition of the same name, featuring the work of fourteen artists, most unknown in New York at the time, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York....
, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation. Hedrick was also a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading
Six Gallery reading
The Six Gallery reading was a poetry-reading which occurred at the Six Gallery on Friday, October 7, 1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco....
, and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam. Wally Hedrick was known as an “idea artist” long before the label “conceptual art” entered the art world, and experimented with innovative use of language in art, at times resorting to puns.
1940s
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 WarKorean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
(1950–1953). Hedrick visited California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...
) in 1946. During this period, he joined Progressive Art Workers with David Simpson, John Stanley and others. The Progressive Art Workers was a social club which also functioned as a co-operative through which the group the members were able to exhibit their works. At this time, too, Vesuvio's bar in San Francisco's North Beach district hired Hedrick as an action painter to work (i.e. 'make paintings') while a jazz combo performed:
"That was his job. He made these paintings and while he would paint the musicians would play along with him. He would go like this and they would go doodoo doop. It was very popular in North Beach. The guy would make four or five paintings in an evening."
1950s
Hedrick's mature artistic career began with paintings of popular imagery—American flags, radios, television cabinets and refrigerators—years before the rise of New York Pop Art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
. John Coplans
John Coplans
John Coplans was a British artist. A veteran of World War II and a photographer, he emigrated to the United States in 1960 and had many exhibitions in Europe and North America...
included Hedrick's use of popular imagery in 1951 in his timeline of the antecedents to Pop Art. Hedrick "began painting flags in the 1950s, before New York's Jasper Johns did. Soon after, Hedrick -- ever the anti-careerist -- painted many of those flags black to protest the Vietnam War."
In the early 1950s, Vesuvio’s bar, a popular Beat hangout, employed Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings. Hedrick's figure, therefore, helped ushered in the Beat lifestyle which ballooned in the later 1950s; by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene. Hedrick once confided to his student Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia
Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia was an American musician best known for his lead guitar work, singing and songwriting with the band the Grateful Dead...
that "he and his friends were the real Beat Generation."
At the time, Hedrick was one of the first San Francisco Artists in the early 1950s to work almost exclusively with metal. He began welding in 1952, and these efforts are considered the first kinetic / junk assemblages. Hedrick made assemblages and sculptures from beer cans, lights, broken radio and television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines he found in junkyards. "What interests me", he said later, is "to take garbage and make it into art, kind of ironic art." He painted over the surfaces with thick layers of impasto and gesso which incorporated the work into the aesthetic of action painting. He 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.
"Some of his most memorable sculptures came from crushing and welding beer cans together, or stacking and welding them...In 1956 he made the first light sculpture that I had ever seen; a fixture that responded to sound. Later on he had the piece on at his house during a Christmas celebration for which Wally put on some Miles and Coltrane on and the sculpture went crazy! I also remember his assemblage Xmas Tree Sculpture, that lit up and danced!"
Although using beer cans was popularized in 1960 by Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
, Hedrick began the practice in art many years earlier, during the early 1950s. One of Hedrick's favorite beer can sculptures "was made up of smashed beer cans in a kind of pyramid, as sort of a mountain, so I called it American Everest." The welded beer can sculptures "carried over until -- 1969."
During the 1950s, Hedrick's efforts followed two main paths: painting and sculpture. More specifically, between 1952 - 1958, Hedrick begins his kenetic junk assemblages, beer can sculptures and 'Black Painting' series. Not only do Hedrick's junk kenetic beer can sculptures, now all lost or destroyed, possibly rank as the seminal "kinetic junk sculptures...made before Tinguely", but also, Hedrick is one of the first American artists to oppose US intervention in South Vietnam.
Pre-Conceptualist
Some artists at the time considered Hedrick a 'pre-conceptualist': "Wally's mind, I think... is of primary significance in this way. I think he's much more a preconceptualist than perhaps any of the others... the paintings, and the objects that he created are really more expressions of an idea." Indeed, Marcel DuchampMarcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
"was one of Wally's greatest gods, always."
Korean War
In 1951, during the Korean WarKorean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
, Hedrick was drafted into the United States Army
United States Army
The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...
against his will, escorted away by US Army MPs without even having the chance to call his parents. "Wally must have been a problem for them, though, because Wally didn't ever do military things quite the way they intended...you told Wally not to do it, that's what he would do. He was stationed in Korea
Korea
Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...
until 1952. During this time, his paintings and assemblages shifted from neo-cubism to metaphysics to political subjects painted in a cartoonish style and dealing particularly with the escalation of the Vietnam War.
Studio 13 Jazz Band
Hedrick joined the Studio 13 Jazz Band in 1952. The group was founded at the San Francisco Art InstituteSan Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...
in the late 1940s by two members of the Bay Area figurative painters David Park and Elmer Bischoff.
Peace (1953)
In 1953, one of the earliest paintings of his career as an artist presented a crumpled American flag defaced with the word 'Peace'. Thomas E. CrowThomas E. Crow
Thomas E. Crow is an American art historian and art critic who is best known for his influential writing on the role of art in modern society and culture....
contrasts this work with Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
’s "anonymous stenciling", drawing attention to the way Hedrick mimics the flamboyant calligraphy found in the decoration of hot-rod cars. Crow sees the work in contrast to Johns’s reticence, as a protest aimed against the waste of lives in Korea, and at Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
adventurism in general. Additionally, Peace (1953), "demonstrates an intuitive understanding of 'language as symbol' which predates the present postmodern use (of language) by twenty years. Hedrick’s pre-pop paintings were included in John Coplan’s historical “Pop Art, USA," the first exhibition to attempt a collective look at the movement in the United States, presented at the Oakland Art Museum during September, 1963. Even after his Pop Art phase, Hedrick continued "his risk-taking forays into regions where, mostly, angels fear to tread",.
In the late 1940s he experimented with light. By 1953 he had created a “light machine” that combined keyboard, glass, speakers, and homemade projectors and colored lights that responded to changes in pitch, register, and volume, which was an early precursor of the psychedelic light shows of the '60s -- and years before the light shows of Haight-Ashbury.
'A Genuine Beatnik' Who Helped Usher in the Beat Generation
Jerry GarciaJerry Garcia
Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia was an American musician best known for his lead guitar work, singing and songwriting with the band the Grateful Dead...
of The Grateful Dead studied with Wally Hedrick and Elmer Bischoff at San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...
. It was the only school Garcia would ever be proud of attending. Hedrick served Garcia as a model not only as a painter but as an expositor of a way of life. To Garcia, Hedrick was a genuine beatnik. 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. It was Hedrick who turned the young Garcia on to acoustic blues and Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
’s On the Road and all its attendant attitudes. On the Road changed Garcia’s life forever. “Wally taught me that art is not only something you do, but something you are.”
In fact, as "a genuine beatnik" Hedrick was employed at a 'beatnik' bohemian sitting at the bar at Vesuvios, a famous hangout in San Francisco’s North Beach. Vesuvio’s employed Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings. Hedrick's figure, therefore, helped ushered in the Beat lifestyle which ballooned in the later 1950s; by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene.
Although Hedrick once confided to his student Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia
Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia was an American musician best known for his lead guitar work, singing and songwriting with the band the Grateful Dead...
that "he and his friends were the real Beat Generation, the seminal visual artists in the 1950s in San Francisco, including Hedrick, shunned the ‘beatnik’ label. None of them liked being called “Beats” and they especially abhorred the label “Beatniks,” a sobriquet of disparagement coined by San Francisco’s famed columnist Herb Caen
Herb Caen
Herbert Eugene Caen was a Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco journalistwhose daily column of local goings-on, social and political happenings,...
. As Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines.-Early life:...
stated: “I don’t know any artist that would call himself a beat artist…If somebody did, you’d consider him a fake, a fraud running a scam.”
The Six Gallery, happenings, and Funk Art
The opening night was the big thing in San Francisco. The opening night and all the artists, mainly artists, went out there and those few people that were into socialites or whatever they were, they went out. And then after that, you could go out there during a weekday and there would be nobody in the gallery. Nobody gave a damn. -- John Saccaro
Made from what was known as the King Ubu Gallery ("an all poet thing"), in 1954, Hedrick co-founded The Six Gallery in San Francisco, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
with David Simpson, Hayward King, John Allen Ryan, Deborah Remington
Deborah Remington
Deborah Remington was an American painter. She lived and worked in New York City and Pennsylvania. Remington was a veteran of more than 30 solo exhibitions and hundreds of group exhibitions including 3 Whitney Museum of American Art annuals...
and Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.-Life and work:...
-- and by 1955, had "become the official director". Although "the activities of the "6" were poorly documented", the Six Gallery functioned as an underground art gallery
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
for the members and a meeting place for poets and literati alike. "The Six" was a focal point for countercultural activity during a crucial transition point—unconventional artists were deep underground—partly because no audience enouraged them to emerge, partly because it was safer there. "The Six" delighted at the chance to defy authority. As the gallery director, Hedrick organized and participated in the spontaneous exhibition/poetry reading/performance events that were the precursors of the 'Happenings' of the 1960s.
"We didn't think of ourselves as a group. The other groups had a very strong group feeling, and they'd sit around and talk about taking over the world, or at least every art department in the Bay Area."
In the wake of the artist collective galleries such as Ubu and Six came galleries run by professionals.
"Hedrick was instrumental in transforming the cheery satire of Pop Art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
into the more outrageous bite of funk art." The birth of 'California Funk Art' can be found at the Six Gallery. Robert Arneson
Robert Arneson
Robert Carston Arneson was an American sculptor and professor of ceramics in the Art department at UC Davis for four decades.- Career :...
, the so-called "Father of the Ceramic Funk Art movement". considered Hedrick, "The Godfather of Funk Art".
Hedrick received his B.F.A.
Bachelor of Fine Arts
In the United States and Canada, the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, usually abbreviated BFA, is the standard undergraduate degree for students seeking a professional education in the visual or performing arts. In some countries such a degree is called a Bachelor of Creative Arts or BCA...
in Art from the San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...
in 1955.
The Six Gallery reading
- See main article Six Gallery readingSix Gallery readingThe Six Gallery reading was a poetry-reading which occurred at the Six Gallery on Friday, October 7, 1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco....
"The Six Gallery reading
Six Gallery reading
The Six Gallery reading was a poetry-reading which occurred at the Six Gallery on Friday, October 7, 1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco....
" took place on October 7, 1955 at the Six Gallery, when Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, at Hedrick's invitation, read "Howl
Howl
"Howl" is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch...
" for the first time. The event has become nearly as much a part of the city's mystique as the 1849 Gold Rush or the 1906 earthquake.
Hedrick approached Ginsberg in mid-1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery. At first, Ginsberg refused, but once he’d written a rough draft of Howl
Howl
"Howl" is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch...
, he changed his mind. An account of the night can be found in Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
's novel The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The semi-fictional accounts in the novel are based upon events that occurred years after the events of On the Road...
, where he describes collecting change from each audience member to buy jugs of wine with Hedrick.
Hedrick's 'Six Gallery Reading' was the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation and helped to herald the West Coast artistic revolution that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance
San Francisco Renaissance
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. However, others The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range...
.
Jay DeFeo
In the late 1950s, San Francisco became the beat poetry capital of the universe, but the visual artists who were part of the same epoch are less celebrated. The three-story building at 2322-24 Fillmore, where Hedrick and Jay DeFeo lived and worked was the unofficial epicenter of the small San Francisco art world in the years 1955-65. Hedrick met artist Jay DeFeoJay DeFeo
Jay DeFeo was a visual artist associated with the Beat generation who worked c.1950-1989 in the San Francisco Bay Area....
, a student at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and they married in 1954. Jay DeFeo
Jay DeFeo
Jay DeFeo was a visual artist associated with the Beat generation who worked c.1950-1989 in the San Francisco Bay Area....
's best-known painting, "The Rose", was made in their Filmore Street apartment, took almost eight years to create and weighs 2,300 pounds, all paid for by her husband, Wally Hedrick.
Kinetic sculpture
When I arrived in San Francisco in 1957, I remember going to The Place at North Beach with Michael McClureMichael McClureMichael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...
. There was this assemblage by Wally Hedrick in the window. I think it was part of a stovepipe, there was a doll's head in the vent, and it had wheels; it was like a cart (with a cane on it). -- Bruce ConnerBruce ConnerBruce Conner was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines.-Early life:...
'The Christmas Tree' was supposed to have something to do with playing colors by light, but it was totally random as far as I could tell, just absurd. -- Bruce ConnerBruce ConnerBruce Conner was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines.-Early life:...
In 1958 one of his mechanical assemblages "attacked" a woman at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...
's annual Christmas party and holiday exhibition. His "Xmas Tree" was "sort of the pinnacle of the kinetic junk sculptures because I'd never attempted anything so complicated", built out of "two radios, two phonographs, flashing lights, electric fans, saw motor--all controlled by timers, hooked so [they] would cycle all these things." One of the record players played "I Hate to See Christmas Come Around." At the opening, which Hedrick refused to attend, he set a timer so that the piece "suddenly began flashing its lights, honking its horns, and playing its records." One woman who was standing next to the piece when it suddenly turned on found her fur coat tangled in it and then received an electrical shock. "It caused quite a sensation not because of its artistic merit, but because it attacked this lady, which I thought was very nice... I wasn't making it as an art thing. I was more interested in making a "thing", and if it attacked people—well I guess I knew it was going to attack...I knew it would probably attack because I laid the trap. So it entertained me; I thought the evening was a success."
Sixteen Americans
In 1955, art curator Dorothy Miller came to the West Coast. She included Hedrick in the 1959 Sixteen Americans show at the Museum of Modern ArtMuseum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, NY. Most of the participants in this now infamous exhibition have since become firmly placed in the pantheon of Pop Art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
, Minimal Art and Contemporary Art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
: for example Hedrick's then wife, Jay DeFeo
Jay DeFeo
Jay DeFeo was a visual artist associated with the Beat generation who worked c.1950-1989 in the San Francisco Bay Area....
, Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
, Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to...
, Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
, and Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
. 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. It would be 25 years before Hedrick figured prominently again in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, during the Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
’s, Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965 exhibition in 1995.
Not only did 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
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
, Franz Kline
Franz Kline
Franz Jozef Kline was an American painter mainly associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement centered around New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and attended Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys...
, and Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....
were too firmly rooted in formal traditions. Instead, Hedrick asserted, “You’ve got to have a deep sense of the human and you have to have a political stance. Painting is not above politics. Anything that has to do with the soul also has to do with the stomach.
In 1959, again recalling his Asian military experience, Hedrick painted "Anger" (or "Madame Nhu’s Bar-B-Q"), the first artistic denunciation of American policy in Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
. Anger, visually equates an act of forceful sexual penetration with corrupt political manipulation. Explosive rage and indignation are symbolized by an atomic cloud serving double duty as the form of male and female genitalia perpetrating the deed."
In 1959, both Hedrick and DeFeo became an original members of Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines.-Early life:...
's Rat Bastard Protective Association
Rat Bastard Protective Association
The Rat Bastard Protective Association was an informal group of Beat and Funk artists who worked and exhibited together in San Francisco, California from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s. The association was founded by and the group's name was coined by Bruce Conner in 1959...
1960s
Hedrick and DeFeo's apartment lease at 2322 Fillmore was suddenly terminated (due in part to DeFeo's excesses) toward the end of 1965. Hedrick and DeFeo divorced in 1969.The Black Paintings were Hedrick's protest against the Vietnam War. Hedrick took "about 50" of his early canvases and painted them black. Hedrick's Black Paintings culminate in 1967 with "War Room". This series "was an idiosyncratic protest, but a passionate one."
War Room
War RoomWar Room (Wally Hedrick)
The War Room , by Wally Hedrick , consists of eight canvases approximately 5 feet wide and 11 feet tall, all painted a deep black. Hedrick referred to these canvases as "wounded veterans". These canvases are bolted together to create a freestanding square room that could be entered via a small door...
is "a group of four eleven-by-eleven foot black canvases, each filling a wall of the room" then arranged "into a square...in the shape of a room...and a door to go in it." The installation has been described as a significant item of Bay Area art history.
During this time, Hedrick was accused of stealing paintings, including a canvas by Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism.-Biography:...
, from the San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...
, where he was teaching, then either painting them black or painting his own iconoclastic pictures over them.
Wally Hedrick: The Dark Millenium, by Gina Dorré and LG Williams, is an in-depth account of The War Room and Black Painting Series between 1953-2003.
In December 2008, Christopher Miles, art critic for the LA Weekly, nominated the War Room (exhibited at Mara McCarthy's The Box, March 21 - April 26,) for Best Show of the Year (2008).
Also, in December 2008, Walead Beshty, art critic for Artforum Magazine, nominated the War Room (exhibited at Mara McCarthy's The Box, March 21 - April 26) among the most notable Los Angeles exhibitions in 2008.
1970s (Wally's Fix-It Shop)
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...
, after circulating a petition protesting America's presence in Vietnam.
After the dismissal Hedrick began a period of self-imposed artistic exile, devoting most of his time to operating a home repair business (appropriately named, "Wally's Fix-It Shop") in the town of San Geronimo, California
San Geronimo, California
San Geronimo is a census-designated place located in the San Geronimo Valley in Marin County, California in the United States. San Geronimo is located southwest of downtown Novato, at an elevation of 292 feet...
. This is an example of the way Hedrick "operates outside the busy highway of contemporary art". The small repair business proved moderately successful. Hedrick's repair skills were first recognized during the Korean War, when he was given the task of fixing radios.
His paintings of the 1970s were mainly crude black and white renditions of old mail order catalogue illustrations.
1980s
In the 1980s he shifted to large-scale canvases of rough and aggressive imagery, often sexual." From 1988 to his death, Hedrick lived and worked in Bodega, California, with his long-time companion, Catherine Conlin.1990s
Gulf War
The Persian Gulf War , commonly referred to as simply the Gulf War, was a war waged by a U.N.-authorized coalition force from 34 nations led by the United States, against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait.The war is also known under other names, such as the First Gulf...
, slathering the older black paintings them with new statements in white acrylic paint
Paint
Paint is any liquid, liquefiable, or mastic composition which after application to a substrate in a thin layer is converted to an opaque solid film. One may also consider the digital mimicry thereof...
like, "So damn, whose sane?".
2000s
After 25 years, The War Room was brought out of storage to be the centerpiece for the 5th Annual San Francisco International Art Fair in 2003, courtesy of Lincart. The work was described as "the most topical thing on view." In 2003, with new American aggression taking place in the Persian GulfPersian Gulf
The Persian Gulf, in Southwest Asia, is an extension of the Indian Ocean located between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.The Persian Gulf was the focus of the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War, in which each side attacked the other's oil tankers...
, Hedrick returned to making all-black paintings.
Significance and legacy
I can remember in about 1959 or '60, the joke going around the art school in the city was, "A garage man had hauled away Hedrick's paintings and said, 'I don't know what art is.'" We'd all laugh like mad, you know, 'cause most of us weren't sympathetic towards Wally Hedrick's art at that time. -- Terry St. John
As early as 1963, John Coplans, the future editor of Artforum Magazine (January 1972–January 1977), would confess the "fashionable world of contemporary painting" (i.e. East Coast) unpleasant reaction to the independent, offensive, 35 year old Hedrick: "there is little doubt that Hedrick is an original, yet the fashionable world of contemporary painting tends to reject Wally Hedrick's work out of hand." Its no surprise, therefore, “the pathos of Hedrick’s situation was that few not already converted were ever likely to witness Hedrick’s accomplishments." William T. Wiley
William T. Wiley
William T. Wiley is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, performance, and pinball. At least some of Wiley's work has been referred to as Funk art....
described Hedrick as "amazing".
- The absence of a wider art culture alert to experimental new work invariably choked off promising” widespread commercial or public acclaim. Indeed, West Coast marginalized artists differed from their East Coast counterparts in that they “lacked any stable structure of galleries, patrons, and audiences that might have given them realistic hopes for worldly success. There was no artworld in Hedrick’s region.
- Hedrick despised the art 'establishment', yet he was an underground institution. This counter-cultural, anti-establishment attitude became "an important part of the Bay Area art scene, the characteristic part." 'Funk art' at its core, was "reaction against what had gone before, establishment art" -- and Wally was its leader "more than perhaps any of the others." "Wally's idea of the best Funk Art, puts it right out in front, you know...in its very self-conscious avoidance of all the references to art, to an object of worth, of social acceptance, that you could possibly contrive." Still, to many, Hedrick was an "unofficial gateway", "Wally and Jay's (DeFeo's) house on Fillmore was the unofficial first stop on the art itinerary of anyone important in the art world, national or international."
- Hedrick's iconoclastic, raunchy artistic temperament thwarted the conditions by which any critical determination, or any commercial success could begin. He said, "It's not that I don't want to sell my paintings, it's just that people who can afford them don't deserve them, and people who deserve them can't afford them." Throughout his life, he shunned media attention. Art curator Walter Hopps
Walter HoppsWalter Hopps was an American museum director and curator of contemporary art. His obituary in the Washington Post described him as a "sort of a gonzo museum director -- elusive, unpredictable, outlandish in his range, jagged in his vision, heedless of rules."Hopps was born in Eagle Rock, Los...
, in his forward to 1985 Hedrick’s Adeline Kent Award exhibition catalogue at the San Francisco Art InstituteSan Francisco Art InstituteSan Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...
, stated that Hedrick "decided to ignore the ideal of "career", "fame" and "greatness" to which his peers aspired, and settled for a simpler life, uncomplicated by openings and galleries and cocktail parties."- "Hedrick's uncompromising attitude. Throughout his career, he has rejected the use of serial imagery or style as a means of achieving recognition in the commercial marketplace, varying his technique and medium to best serve his ideas." He never cesed to creatively forged ahead, whereas "too many of the other iconoclasts of the same era have themselves become icons, cranking out homages to their own faded talents.
- "Hedrick consistently refused to be interested in what he describes as a "high art look," which he then considered a waste of time and energy." Additionally, the subject matter and motifs of his art often included "rough and aggressive imagery, "painted in a fury that gains its edge from the blatant sexual rawness. Thus, Hedrick's "big, tough paintings are strong medicine...and disturbingly enigmatic."
The cultural historian Rebecca Solnit in her 1990 book, The Secret Exhibition: Six Californian Artists, reasserted Hedrick’s artistic achievements:
It is now possible to say that Hedrick was ahead of his time: the first American to protest the Vietnam War, the artist to paint flags before Jasper Johns painted flags, who made kinetic junk sculpture before Tinguely did. Hedrick was a forerunner of Pop Art, Bad Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation. It might be more useful to view Hedrick as an artist who was of his time in a unique way, a maverick whose responses to the world showed it in a different light.
"Maybe the most important thing about Wally is that he could have been so rich and so successful and so famous," said Professor Rollison, a colleague of Hedrick's at The College of Marin
College of Marin
The College of Marin is a community college in Marin County, California, U.S., with two campuses, one in Kentfield, and the second in Novato. It is the only institution operated by the Marin Community College District. Its chief executive officer is currently Superintendent/President David Wain...
.
Career highlights
Hedrick’s works have been exhibited in galleries and museums including The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...
, Whitney Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an art museum in Los Angeles, California. It is located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles, adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits....
, and The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum
M. H. de Young Memorial Museum
The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, commonly called simply the de Young Museum, is a fine arts museum located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. It is named for early San Francisco newspaperman M. H...
. His work resides in public collections which include The Smithsonian Institution, The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...
, and The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum
M. H. de Young Memorial Museum
The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, commonly called simply the de Young Museum, is a fine arts museum located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. It is named for early San Francisco newspaperman M. H...
.
Hedrick taught at the San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...
"shortly after graduating (from SFAI). In 1959 he also stopped teaching as a form of protest against the war, and was eventually fired." Later, Hedrick taught at San Francisco Academy of Art, San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University is a public university located in San Francisco, California. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers over 100 areas of study from nine academic colleges...
, University of California at Davis, San Jose State University
San José State University
San Jose State University is a public university located in San Jose, California, United States...
and the College of Marin
College of Marin
The College of Marin is a community college in Marin County, California, U.S., with two campuses, one in Kentfield, and the second in Novato. It is the only institution operated by the Marin Community College District. Its chief executive officer is currently Superintendent/President David Wain...
, where he held Professor Emeritus status. His students included Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia
Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia was an American musician best known for his lead guitar work, singing and songwriting with the band the Grateful Dead...
of the Grateful Dead
Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The band was known for its unique and eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, country, improvisational jazz, psychedelia, and space rock, and for live performances of long...
http://biography.jrank.org/pages/3611/Garcia-Jerry-1942-1995-Musician-Traded-in-Accordion-Guitar.html, William Wiley
William Wiley
William Wiley was a sailor of the United States Navy in the 19th century who served in the First Barbary War.Besides a few details of his service in the Navy, little is known of the life of William Wiley. He entered the Navy on 2 April 1803 and was assigned to the schooner Enterprise in the...
, Robert H. Hudson
Robert H. Hudson
Robert Hudson is an American artist who was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and grew up in Richland, Washington. He received a B.F.A in 1961 and an M.F.A. in 1963, both from the San Francisco Art Institute....
, William Allen
William Allen
- Politicians :* William Allen , Canadian politician from Toronto* William Allen , American congressman from Ohio* William Allen , American politician from Ohio...
and Mike Henderson.
Famous works
- Flag, (1953), Oil on canvas, 18 x 14", Private Collection: "Hedrick...painted flags before Johns painted flags." -- Rebecca Solnit, The Secret Exhibition (1990)
- Anger, (1953/59), 65 X 65", Oil on Canvas. San Jose Museum of Art Permanent Collection.
- Christmas Tree, (1958), Kenetic Sculpture and Assemblage, Exhibited and Destroyed at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
- Black Painting, (c. 1965-68), Oil on Canvas, 48 x 48”. Col: Richard Reisman, Napa, CA.
- The War Room, (1967).
Awards and honors
- National Endowment Arts (1962, 1982, 1993)
- Adeline Kent Award, San Francisco Art Institute (1985)
- San Francisco Foundation Award (1985, 1986)
- Golden Bear Award, California State Fair (1990)
- Merit award, California State Fair (1991)
- Award of Excellence, California State Fair (1996)
- Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Found (1997)
- Pollock-Krasner FoundationPollock-Krasner FoundationThe Pollock-Krasner Foundation was established in 1985 for the purpose of providing financial assistance to individual working artists of established ability. It was established at the bequest of Lee Krasner, who was an American abstract expressionist painter and the widow of fellow painter Jackson...
(1999)
Selected one person exhibitions
- Pasadena Art Center (1950)
- Area Arts Gallery, San Francisco (1954)
- M.H. De Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco (1955)
- San Francisco Art Association Gallery (1956)
- Oakland Art Museum (1958)
- Isaacs Gallery, Toronto, Canada (1961)
- New Mission Gallery, San Francisco (1963)
Selected group exhibitions
- Pasadena Art Museum, Annual (1948)
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Annual (1953)
- San Francisco Museum of Art, Annual (1954, 1957, 1960, 1966)
- Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1st Biennial (1956)
- Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sixteen Americans (1959)
- California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, Winter Invitational (1959–61)
- San Francisco Museum of Art, Places - A Collaboration of 4 Artists (1962)
- San Francisco Museum of Art, The Art of San Francisco (1962)