Visiting Artist Film Screening @ Pop Start*
Tuesday, October 6th @ 6:30pm
Free Admission! And Food!
How She Got Good by Tameka Norris
HOW SHE GOT GOOD frenetically documents the struggles of Norris’s alter-ego Meka Jean as she alternately succeeds and fails in art, music, and personal relationships. Meka Jean’s search for clarity somehow parallels the rapidly changing cityscape of post-Katrina New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast.
Making a film, of course, is never easy. Over the course of producing HOW SHE GOT GOOD, one of Norris’s collaborator’s—a woman of color who has benefited from her position as the daughter of a successful and wealthy (white) New York artist—stole and repurposed much of the film’s footage, coopting a project very deeply rooted in Norris’s own skin and the visibility of her body. Another collaborator, a white male colleague, threatened to shut down the production of HOW SHE GOT GOOD and attempted to strong arm Norris into passing along a share of the profits to him, even though he had already been paid.
*Pop Start is across the street from the York Super Dollar.