The Last Supper & SFIAF Holiday Parties

SFIAF 2023 Holiday Party
In-tandem with our regularly scheduled Last Supper Party on Saturday December 3 featuring Georgina Marie and Mia Ruiz, SFIAF will use its traditional annual holiday party to announce the line-up for the 2023 Festival scheduled to open in San Francisco's Mission district on Thursday, June 8.

We invite the Festival community to come over to our Polk Gulch venue on Sutter Street to meet some of the artists who will be featured in the 2023 Festival, find out more about their 2023 Festival Projects and to raise a glass in celebration of the holiday season. The artist host committee is pictured above.

The Last Supper Party Performance Series
The Last Supper Party is a spoken word and performance series inspired by Fe Bongolan’s landmark painting of the same name; a 200 sq. ft. canvas that defines our Sutter Street office and live arts venue.

The Last Supper Party presents the voices of diverse artists and writers who call out the myriad injustices and impacts of corruption, unchecked power and greed.

We invite our audience to share ideas and bread and find inspiration in the thoughts and words of artists whose perspectives are drawn from a kaleidoscope of cultures. But who are united by compassion and a common desire to seek justice, equity and truth.

The Story of The Last Supper Party Painting
“1985. Ronald Reagan was still President. The global movement to end apartheid and free Nelson Mandela from Robben Island Prison was underway. In San Francisco homelessness was ramping up. The AIDS pandemic was taking down swaths of our city’s population: friends, family, and co-workers. Yet a whole other world of class and wealth did nothing while the rest of our world was in trouble. Sitting in my studio in an Inverness cabin, I stayed with my paints and let something happen. It was there that I found my artist’s voice to not attack directly, but to let the exposure of that apathy – bred by a society that embraced greed over humanity—do the work.

Thirty six years later, with all that has changed and not changed, it is painfully unsurprising that this painting still shouts.”

~ Fe Bongolan

About the Artists

Georgina Marie Guardado
Georgina Marie Guardado is the Poet Laureate of Lake County for 2020-2024, a Poets Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets, and Poet in Residence for The Bloom. She has received support from the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, where she now serves on the Board of Directors, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in The Bloom, Noyo Review, Poets.org, Humble Pie Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, and Yellow Medicine Review, and is forthcoming in Colossus: Freedom and The Muleskinner Journal. She is currently working on her full-length poetry manuscript, The Length of Trauma Covets.

Mia Ruiz
Mia Ruiz is a first generation, Peruvian-American poet, mestiza of Andean origin. She resides in the beautifully biodiverse, geographically chaotic, complicated county of Lake, CA.  Her home sits before Clear Lake on land where the Southeastern Pomo tended and lived for over 10,000 years; across from the Elem Indian Colony of Pomo Indians of the Sulphur Bank Rancheria and Mt. Konocti, a ‘dormant’ volcano, whose threat of eruption was elevated to ‘high’ risk in 2018.  Her poems have been published in two anthologies entitled Resilience and Restore compiled through Middletown Art Center after the recent firestorms.

Kimi Sugioka (Curator)
Kimi Sugioka is a poet, songwriter, and educator. She is the current Poet Laureate for the City of Alameda, a post that includes creating platforms for the presentation of a diverse variety of poets and spoken-word artists. Kimi also performs her own work frequently throughout the Bay Area. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and raised in Berkeley, California, Kimi has worked in public education for decades, and earned her BA from San Francisco State University and MFA from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Fe Bongolan (Creator of The Last Supper Party Painting)
Fe Bongolan is a Bay Area visual and performing artist. She is an alumnae of San Francisco State University with a Bachelor’s degree in Crafts and Design. She found theater arts in her last year at SFSU, and to this day it consumes her life. After working as an actress with Asian American Theater Company and Teatro Campesino, in 1992 she began work with the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, immediately involved as an artist from the community working alongside Rhodessa Jones in helping women inmates from San Francisco County Jail write their stories for performance. In 28 years with the Medea Project, Fe developed as actor, writer, dramaturge and assistant director to Rhodessa, helping inmates and ex-offenders find their voice and develop their writing for performance in jail, the community and main stage.