Honoring the life of Margaret Tedesco

Margaret Tedesco was an artist, dancer, curator, and writer whose work shaped the San Francisco art community for more than four decades. Through her gallery [ 2nd floor projects ], her performances, and her writing, she created space for artists and audiences to look closely and speak freely.

One year after her passing, we are gathering her artworks (both personal and collected), exhibition records, correspondence, and media into a public archive.

Margaret’s archive defies easy categorization, moving through four decades of dance and performance work, beginning in the Santa Barbara dance scene of the 1980s, to the materials she collected in service of a lifelong archival impulse. These range from rare art books and curious objects, both found and made, to an exhaustive collection of exhibition ephemera from artists around the world, with a particular concentration in the San Francisco Bay Area, together forming a remarkable record of the region’s art and cultural life.

Her 2nd Floor Projects archive is itself a time capsule of the vibrant community Margaret fostered for nearly a decade, including the book designs and artist books she made for the space. Alongside these are extensive magazine and newspaper clippings and a wealth of correspondence from friends, colleagues, mentees, collaborators, and family. Together, these materials form a dynamic, interconnected portrait of Bay Area queer history, tracing feminist and queer voices through the AIDS crisis and the art made in response to it.

Though deeply rooted in San Francisco, Margaret has a global presence and her archive reflects decades of connections with artists, writers, and collaborators worldwide.