Margaret Tedesco, Artist and Curator, Was the ‘Spirit of San Francisco’

Margaret Tedesco, an artist, curator and Bay Area art-world supporter, died on Saturday, Oct. 18, several years after she was diagnosed with cancer.

Tedesco was a generous, nearly omnipresent figure at Bay Area performances, poetry readings, gallery openings, film screenings and talks. Sometimes she was the artist. More often, she was a member of the audience — one who would always let you know what she thought.

“She pushed people to grow because she did that,” says Leila Weefur, a close friend and collaborator who curated, with Tedesco, the 2021 exhibition A Spirit of Disruption at the San Francisco Art Institute. “She did whatever she wanted.”

Tedesco grew up in an Italian American family in Los Angeles, attending clubs and rock shows on the Sunset Strip as a teenager. She moved to San Francisco in 1988 after establishing herself as a modern dancer and choreographer in Santa Barbara, and quickly became a fixture of the San Francisco art scene.

“I always thought she was from New York,” recalls her friend Cliff Hengst, who met Tedesco at the arts space The Lab, in its original location on Divisadero Street. “When she told me she was from L.A., I was like, ‘What?’ ’Cause she had that attitude of knowing all.”

Tedesco was a great recommender of things: of exhibitions to see, movies to watch, people to connect with. Hengst says he called her “The Conduit.” “Everything flows through her in the city of San Francisco,” he says.

She gained some of this power — of knowing everyone and everything, especially the things happening at a DIY, grassroots level — from working as a graphic designer for SFAI. There, she made 14 years of MFA catalogs, meeting with each graduating artist to go through photo touchups and page arrangements.

Her memory for artists and their artwork was staggering. Interviewed by the arts and culture podcast Congratulations Pine Tree in 2016, Tedesco acknowledged and simultaneously downplayed this superpower. “The community just rolls off my head,” she said. “People’s work, how they make work, what they do, who they interact with.”

While Tedesco continued to perform as a dancer and multimedia artist during her early years in San Francisco, her work took a more curatorial turn in the late ’90s.

In 1999, after performing at New Langton Arts, Tedesco joined the board of the now-legendary multidisciplinary arts space. Susan Miller, who was executive director at the time, remembers Tedesco brought in artists like Nao Bustamante, Tania Bruguera, Mads Lynnerup, Chris Sollars and Patty Chang.

“Once she came onto the board, she was an indispensable resource for Langton, and for me, personally,” Miller says. Tedesco was tapped into queer politics, specific Bay Area esthetics, performance, and “a kind of grunge, odd look at pop culture,” Miller adds.

At the same time, Tedesco cofounded Moving Target Series, a roaming performance and exhibition program that popped up at venues like The Lab, New Langton and Z-Space.

In 2007, shortly after she left the New Langton board, Tedesco opened 2nd floor projects, a small exhibition space in her Mission District apartment — though the entire enterprise was concealed from her landlord.

The gallery’s under-the-radar-ness led to some creative constraints. Hengst remembers a 2010 show: “We couldn’t make a peep because her landlord had been getting wise to the fact that there’s all these people coming in and out of this apartment,” he recalls. So the group traipsed down to the lobby and whisper-sang “This Land Is Your Land.”

“I still love it as one of my favorite pieces,” Hengst says.

2nd floor projects distinguished itself in other ways, too. Tedesco designed and printed limited-edition chapbooks or prints for each show, commissioning writers to produce a text that was also treated as an art object.

Jackie Im, co-director of the Mission District gallery Et al., wrote a text for a show Tedesco curated at NIAD in 2019. She says being invited to write so creatively — not necessarily in response to the exhibition, but wherever her thoughts lead her — was a rare experience. “I really went for it in a way that I don’t actually have many opportunities to do,” she says. “Which I was super grateful for.”

Tedesco contributed her own writing to Open Space, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s now-retired online publishing platform, pulling in disparate references to work she admired across disciplines. Film was her first love; she watched two movies a day.

Despite her own background on the stage, Tedesco was best known as a behind-the-scenes supporter who was far more comfortable in the wings. She was notoriously camera-shy. “She was particular about how she was perceived,” says Scott Hewicker, another longtime friend who showed at 2nd floor projects.

Tedesco would, however, help out with bit parts when called upon, like when she played herself, aka “The Spirit of San Francisco,” in the play Seth Speaks.

In that 2016 interview with Congratulations Pine Tree, she said she was never really interested in being “a careerist.”

“I think that the space is also part of my practice profoundly,” she said of 2nd floor projects. “And also I’m an archivist at heart.”

Tedesco leaves behind an enormous archive of artwork, printed materials and ephemera — a collection that occupies one of the bedrooms of her apartment. Over the years, she shared objects from the archive on her Instagram account, and in a 2022 exhibition at Et al. Few, if any, visitors were allowed into the space.

“This archive is my disparate collection of source materials,” she said at a talk at Kadist in 2013. “It provides a kind of daily improvisation which I splice together when making, and a relaxation when I wander. And it is also a burden.”

After 2nd floor projects held its final exhibition in 2017, Tedesco continued to independently curate. She organized shows at the San Francisco Arts Commission, fused space and, with Weefur, SFAI’s bittersweet 150th anniversary exhibition. The campus, which fostered so many of Tedesco’s personal and professional relationships, closed its doors for good in 2022.

Tedesco was a private person. Her exact age was a mystery to many, including close friends. “She was always in the present,” Miller explains. “What’s happening now mattered to her.”

And through her very presence — or an email, or a text message — she would let members of the Bay Area art community know that they, and their work, mattered too. Even after she began treatment for cancer, Tedesco continued to show up.

“Her energy just seemed inexhaustible,” says longtime friend DL Alvarez. “I don’t know that any one person could really fill the shoes of Margaret. You’d have to have a small committee.”

A memorial gathering is currently being planned for November. Details to come.