Margaret Tedesco (1952-2025) was an influential artist, designer, and curator living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 40 years. In her lifetime she created form-bending art and cultivated some of the region’s most influential experimental artworks through 2nd floor projects, her Mission district gallery. She was an ever-present booster for feminist and queer art and literature and a singular champion of new creative voices and groundbreaking art forms.

We are now in the hopes that you will join us in a community-based funding effort to preserve Margaret Tedesco’s legacy. Margaret left the world with her expansive personal archive, including artifacts and artworks made and collected by Margaret in her lifetime. Your support will underwrite the storage and organizational execution of the archive for possible acquisition, so it is available for research, publication and exhibition purposes.

The collection includes artworks, artist monographs, writings, printed matter, sketches, video documentation of performances, site-specific work, correspondence, and ephemera that document not only an artistic practice, but also a lively cultural history of the San Francisco Bay Area art scene during her professional career. These materials now are packed in 190 boxes and housed in clean, temporary storage in San Francisco.

The histories held in this collection are precisely those that institutions have been slowest to collect and are most likely to disappear. Margaret’s archive maps and nurtures a world that is irreplaceable: the Mission and greater Bay Area underground scenes, queer and feminist art histories, radical and underrepresented voices, and the networks of connection that held it all together. Margaret spent her life making sure other people's work wasn't forgotten.

Now it’s our turn to remember Margaret and her good work by preserving and sharing this rare and historically important collection with the world. While it is secured in storage for the near term, additional funding is needed to finish the job. We are seeking $50,000 to cover storage and to professionally index, inventory, digitize, and preserve this archive to ensure that it survives and becomes accessible, rather than remaining at risk.

If you knew Margaret, you know why we ask. If you didn’t know her but lived in or visited San Francisco any time in the last four decades, you may have been touched by her dynamic presence in the art community. She likely impacted and enriched your life in ways you may not be aware of.

Margaret’s passing is more than a personal loss for all of us. It is also an opportunity to celebrate the artistic communities she loved and believed in through this collection she left for the world.

We hope you will consider contributing to The Margaret Tedesco Archive Project.

Thank you for your attention and support.