Wally Hedrick (1928–2003) was a painter, sculptor, assemblage artist and educator who played a central role in San Francisco’s Beat-era counterculture. Born in Pasadena, California, Hedrick studied at the California School of Fine Arts (later known as San Francisco Art Institute), where he later taught. In 1954, he co-founded San Francisco’s Six Gallery, an artist-run space that became famous as the site of the 1955 poetry reading at which Allen Ginsberg first publicly presented Howl. Hedrick also participated in Bruce Conner’s Rat Bastard Protective Association, an informal community of artists whose experimental work helped shape Bay Area assemblage and Funk. Working across painting, found-object sculpture, kinetic art and assemblage, Hedrick combined humor, wordplay, popular imagery and discarded materials with an often confrontational attitude toward the art establishment and American politics. During the 1950s and ’60s, he became increasingly outspoken against the Vietnam War, incorporating antiwar imagery and language into his work. Hedrick remained an independent and idiosyncratic figure throughout his career, resisting identification with a single movement or style. He taught at several Bay Area institutions as well as the University of California, Davis, and spent much of his later teaching career at the College of Marin.