Trespassing Disciplines: A Remembrance of Margaret Tedesco
Margaret Tedesco was generous with love, and beloved.
I ran into Margaret in 2010 at some opening or event, her sharp eyes searching my face beneath silver streaked bangs, older than me but never old, eternally fashionable in mostly black, she recognized me from my time at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late nineties. I was quite shy as a student, not exactly talking to folks at openings (if I even went to them), or getting to know my fellow students much at all. A shock to be remembered. The next time I saw Margaret, possibly at her apartment gallery [2nd floor projects], she plucked a Polaroid out of her bag of me performing at New Langton Arts from a decade prior, as skinny and awkward as ever, hunched over a microphone telling an extended bad joke. I had no idea there were pictures of that event. Who was this person who remembered, and why did she bother with me?
Margaret was impossibly bighearted. Her memory for names and faces spanned decades of the comings and goings of culture in the Bay. She kept a substantial physical archive, but the one in her head was immeasurably deeper – she held a detailed portrait of this culture in her heart, always expanding and sharing it.
As impressive as Margaret’s deep-seated connection to history was, her intense curiosity and endless appetite for the present was astounding. From poetry readings and art shows, to cinema, Margaret was out there, daily, participating in the world. She didn’t live in the past, she brought her experiences with her to the now. A curator, a book designer, a performance artist, an actor, hers was a life centered around forging networks across generations, across media. Describing her project space [2nd floor projects] for BOMB in 2012, she noted: “From early on in my art practice, I have been interested in trespassing disciplines.” At [2nd floor projects], each exhibition was a collaboration between an artist and a writer with whom she’d produce a limited-edition publication, and organize some manner of reading whether in person or recorded. I’m inspired by how she effortlessly drew connections between worlds.
I never managed to convince Margaret to do a solo exhibition of her work, or to do some sort of exhibition or print project archiving [2nd floor projects], but we did organize an exhibition in the previous iteration of our bookstore. Titled [ out of sync ] - Expanded Notes from 2nd Floor Projects Archive, it sat in an ambiguous space between archive and artist project. Margaret was comfortable with ambiguity, with mystery.
It was only with great reluctance that Margaret disclosed with a tiny circle close to her that she had cancer, asking them not to share this with anyone. Having lived an exemplary healthy life, with constant exercise both physical and mental, good food and eastern medicine, it was a shock to be suddenly drawn into the world of western medicine, but she fought through this hesitancy, committing to the often harsh and brutal ways science fights cancer, while practicing Tai Chi and yoga when she had enough energy. Despite plenty of offers to help in any way I could, to visit her in the hospital or at home when she was recovering from a bout of chemo, she demurred. I think it meant a lot to her, maybe to a fault, to be a presence in the world but not to take energy from it, to not be the story herself, but a reader and teller of the story.
We were close, but Et al., the gallery I run with Jackie Im, happens to be physically close to Margaret’s home, so it wasn’t long into her treatment that she came to our gallery – it was a way to step gently back into the world. In the spring of 2023 she came in, visibly exhausted from the walk and from the medicine. I pulled a few chairs to the center of the gallery and sat with her in front of Rema Ghuloum’s incredible paintings: we spent an hour, probably more, talking about the show, and life, and art, and movies.
In the last couple of years, this became a frequent occurrence: she’d come by during an event or just regular gallery hours, and pull up a chair and spend time with me or our gallery sitters. Still fashionable, even as her silvery hair thinned, adapting a black denim jump suit a friend gave her as an easy uniform. She’d share a brief update about her health of course – treatment options and their side effects, about the lovely doctors and nurses that continued to surprise her with their care – but we tried not to pry. Mostly we’d just talk about the world beyond chemotherapy and the loss of independence which weighed on her. And again, not just about the past, though the past was always given breath by her, made alive, but about what was going on in the art scene broadly, what movies we’d seen, bemoaning the parts of our culture in decline and celebrating the successes of our peers.
Margaret was deeply dedicated to this participation: she existed to give and not to take from those around her. Life is something to be shared, not just lived, and Margaret gave her life to our culture day-in and day-out. She is the model for what is possible, but today, only a few days after learning of her passing, life feels anything but possible.
The short, strange text from an exhibition Et al. curated in 2017 in Mexico City with work by Margaret (she had two objects in the show, a copy of Angela Davis’s biography, and a framed copy of Newsweek from March 29, 1976 featuring a red monochrome portrait of Patty Hearst with the word ‘GUILTY!’ emblazoned across it), ends on a note that feels apt for me, still here, trying to imagine a future without another long chat with Margaret, without seeing her in passing coming to or leaving an exhibition or event:
[…]it is into this present, friends (and ghosts) at our sides, we continue.
Banner Image: Margaret Tedesco, Cameo 2012, Video still of performance, San Francisco. Image courtesy of SFMoMA, 2025.