Margareta Kaukonen was born in 1943 in Lund, Sweden. At 16, she was a layout editor for a young adult magazine called Fick Journal. She met Jorma Kaukonen on a ship traveling from Helsinki to St Petersburg (then Leningrad).
Margareta was a self-taught stand-alone artist in a pre-psychedelic era when art and music were poised to explode. Though an incredibly talented artist, poet and songwriter, Margareta lived most of her life as an active substance abuser and died of renal failure in a hotel room in San Francisco, California...alone. Before she died, she gifted Vanessa Kaukonen with her entire collection of primarily unseen art and poetry. Vanessa has shown her work in several gallery spaces since the 2000s, donating proceeds to facilities that deal with alcohol and substance treatment in teens.
This black and white collection and block cuts are some of her earliest work (1960's) when she came to the U.S.
