If one were to take a quick survey identifying the most prolific collectors of sculpture from the Papuan Gulf in the mid-twentieth century, the name "Hedlund" would quickly appear. While his name has been seen on many a museum label or an auction lot's provenance, only a few publicatons have noted his accomplishments. Little information regarding his life and collecting has been available, especially in pre-internet days. Roy James Hedlund quietly reemerged just before his passing on March 2, 2020.

Born September 24, 1939, to Mr. and Mrs. Dean Hedlund of Oregon, Roy attended Punahou School; the University of Hawaii, Honolulu; and the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California. An artist by training, he had a studio in Oakland and was in the circle of San Francisco Bay Area artists that included Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bishoff. He met his wife, Julie,  at the home of her uncle, the artist Jean Charlot from Kahala, Oahu. They married in 1963 and had two children, Maile and Craig. Roy named his beloved daughter after the Hawaiian Maile Leaf, and Craig follows in his footsteps today and overseas the largest collection of original Peter Hayward oil paintings owned by Hedlund and currently residing at Cedar Street Galleries in Honolulu where Hedlund spent his final years selling art from his extensive personal art collection consisting of hundreds of paintings including several Madge Tennents.

Hedlund's first trip to New Guinea was in 1960, with more extensive trips in 1961, 1963, and 1969. Lemuel Russel Webb, who lived in Honolulu and had an interest in art, had been contacted by a missionary in Papua New Guinea who had collected traditional sculptures. Hedlund, who knew Webb through more conventional arts, decided to go to the Pacific. They became business partners and Webb supervised the shipping, marketing, and sales of the sculptures that Hedlund collected.

After Hedlund's initial visit to the Papuan Gulf area, where he traveled extensively, it was clear that missionization had taken hold, resulting in traditional beliefs and practices being discouraged. Because of this outside influence, local people who owned religious sculptures were destroying or selling their artworks or simply abandoning them out in the open to be claimed by nature. Thus, Hedlund was able to purchase a remarkable number of traditional works of art that were offered for sale. His longest trips were during February-April 1961 and again in October 1961. While he acquired a wide range of objects from several regions including parts of the Sepik, the Highlands, and New Britain, most notable was the collection of spirit boards, gope, and skull racks, agiba, from the Papuan Gulf. Also significant is the photographic documentation that he produced, including black- and-white Polaroids and prints and 35 mm and 2" x2" color transparencies. Many include Hedlund or a local person enlisted to help hold the sculpture. This extraordinarily important photographic archive is preserved at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, primarily due to the efforts of Douglas Newton, who was curator then director of The Museum of Primitive Art (the MPA collection transferred to The Met in 1978).

The photo archive has grown in recent years through the donation of images by Julie Pinney, who separated from Hedlund and later remarried. The photographs were used by Webb to offer the sculptures for sale to museums, dealers, and private collectors. Newton kept all the photographs of objects the MPA was offered (even those not purchased) and deposited them into the then Photographic Archive. Thus, Newton preserved the visual information of the collection formed by Hedlund in a period of field collecting that was rarely matched in the mid twentieth century.

Through the collections purchased by Hedlund, museums across the United States were able to legally acquire rare and unique works of sculpture. Such is the case of a unique agiba from the Papuan Gulf that was collected by Hedlund and acquired by Newton for the MPA that now resides in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another equally rare agiba, also collected by Hedlund, was photographed by him in its shrine. That sculpture went into a private collection and was exhibited only once, in 2006-2007, at The Met. when it was in the collection of Faith-dorian Wright. On one of his several trips, Hedlund collected a remarkable house post made by a Kambot artist also now in The Met's collection. An agiba was sold to The Saint Louis Art Museum and Morton D. May purchased other important sculptures. The Lowe Museum, Berkeley also acquired works. Many works were purchased by prominent private collectors and dealers of the time, including Julius Carlebach.

In an undated interview with Cobey Black, Hedlund articulated the reason for his work: "Because I believe that our wealth is not in Fort Knox, but in our minds, our arts, our appreciation of culture ... I'd like to show that art elevates man ..." and elevate our lives he did.

Dr. Virginia-Lee Webb