Wally Hedrick was kind of a backyard Beat inventor, to paraphrase Thomas Albright's description of him in "Art in the San Francisco Bay Area: 1945-1980". During the 1950's he was one of the founding members of the historical Six Gallery (location of Allen Ginsburgs first public reading of the Howl), and his Filmore Street home, where he lived with artist Jay DeFeo, became a creative center for other painters, poets, filmmakers and musicians.

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In the late 1940's, Hedrick was experimenting with light, and during the 1950's -1970's 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.

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In 1959 Hedrick was included in the seminal exhibition 16 Americans at the Museum of Modern art in New York, and at age 27 a solo exhibition of his work was featured at the MH DeYoung Museum in San Francisco.

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Hedrick was the recipient of many prestigious awards and grants, including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the MH DeYoung Museum, among others.