Channeling the 80s, the Deadly Rise of Reaganomics
and The Last Supper Party

An interview with Artist, Felirene Bongolan

By Ashley Gonzalez

“Actually it hasn’t,” says Fe, the multidisciplinary artist and creator of The Last Supper Party. She laughs ruefully. We’re talking about the sociopolitical implications of the 20-by-10-foot canvas she painted 36 years ago and its continuing impact today.

Newly restored and installed into the Festival’s Sutter Street office, The Last Supper Party will be officially unveiled at a Reception and Performance Event of the same name on Saturday April 2. The public is invited.

On a recent sunny morning, I interviewed Felirene Bongolan about The Last Supper Party, her work with Rhodessa Jones on the Medea Project and her life as an artist. 

Fe is an actor, writer, painter, chef and traveler from Oakland, California. She bemoans the lack of positive change in the world since Reagan was re-elected president in 1984.  “Imagine you did a work that, 40 years projected in the future, still has an impact.”

In a bold red lip and fabulous earrings, Fe shares The Last Supper Party was not a piece she planned to make, “I had no intention of making that piece, that piece came to me.” After the fervor of the anti-Vietnam War movement that peaked in the 1970s, Fe says the 80s were a rude shock to the system. The change and revolution that defined the 1970s, was being overshadowed by Reagan’s presidential campaign and “It’s morning again in America,” rang in her ears.

After spending a whole week on vacation in an Inverness cabin and watching as it looked like Reagan would once again be elected president, Fe was pissed off. “Reagan came and said we don’t have to worry about keeping our heads down as Americans. Let’s be proud, let’s be greedy, let’s make money. Let’s get down to business because corporations can solve everything.” In response Fe started water coloring. 

Fe shared the first impressions of her idea with the Eyes and Ears Foundation’s Mark Rennie. He said the piece should be a feature of the Billboard Café that he ran in SOMA. So with the costs covered by the Eyes and Ears Foundation, Fe went big. The painting was originally installed and displayed above the Billboard Café in October 1984, immediately prior to the November election.

The painting shows people in tuxedos, plates and utensils in hand, helping themselves to the Earth as if they were at a buffet line. “If you just expose it, it will fuck itself!” says Fe.

Although she received a lot of attention because of The Last Supper Party, Fe felt she couldn’t make another piece with the same level of acuity and place in time. After creating the landmark painting, Fe reminisced on her work as an artist and her true passion. “I was searching,” Fe says, and she eventually found her way back to her first love, Theatre.

“I went to Rhodessa Jones's first Medea Project, ‘Reality is Outside the Window,’ and I sat in the Theatre stunned,” says Fe. She describes the feeling as electrifying, a true connection to your highest creative self. Since joining and working with Rhodessa in 1991, Fe knew this creative medium was her calling, “I followed Rhodessa into hell,” she says. It was meaningful, impactful, and healing.

The award winning Medea Project works with incarcerated and HIV-positive women in the United States and South Africa, to create performances wherein these women share their stories. Fe says she learned a lot about middle class pretension, being sheltered and fearful of those cast aside.

Fe shares a bit of what she did on her first evening in jail, when she helped a woman named Juanita tell her story. “I got her to write down what happened to her. And I read it and there were a number of things in the piece that made me think she’s not writing this to tell her story, she’s writing about it as if she’s outside of her body describing it,” Fe says. She learned to understand why Juanita wrote in the third person, but encouraged her to own her story, “I said to Juanita, why don’t we tell the story and replace the she/her with me/I, and then read it.”

Fe’s work in the Medea Project consists of structuring the flow of the scripts and stories of the women who are incarcerated or have HIV. Working with incarcerated women Fe was stepping into a different world and she only hoped she could build a community within these groups of women wherein they are comfortable in sharing their stories and seeing themselves with a little more light. “It’s not about what they did in jail, it’s about what happened to them.”

Further into our conversation Fe shares some of her favorite artists. She raves about the architecture by Zaha Hadid, “Her buildings represent female monuments. They are so stunning. They capture an essence of nature, of a natural world, in a building.”

As a multidisciplinary artist, Fe has dabbled in many creative processes, but a creative process she’s looking forward to experimenting in the future, in fact, one that she’s just started working on is a musical play on the kidnapping and indoctrination of Patty Hearst. “This is a new phase for me in terms of theatre,” Fe says, she radiates excitement and anticipation.

“Why did I become an artist? It’s not ‘become,’ as in choose, and therefore I paint and therefore I write. I am one and I always have been.”

~XXX~