Weekend: Flag-waving, tattoo art and NOEW

Thursday-Friday / Waving the flags: Maybe you knew that flag throwing is a 600-year-old tradition, but we didn’t. So we salute the American Italian Cultural Center for bringing the Flag Wavers of Sansepolcro to New Orleans for a week’s worth of flag-throwing exhibitions. The Renaissance art form, it seems, started in Italy as a way of welcoming home the troops. It was revived in 1953 in Sancepolcro, where performers dress in traditional costumes and literally throw their flags to one another in a sort of choreographed pennant ballet. Flag Throwing exhibitions will take place at 12:15 Thursday at Jesuit High School, at 1:50 p.m. Thursday at Cabrini High School, at noon Friday at the East Bank Regional Library and at 6:30 p.m. Friday at Piazza d’Italia.

Author Jesmyn Ward

Thursday / Delta stories: On Thursday, National Book Award winner and Tulane professor Jesmyn Ward “will talk about what it was like to grow up with stories that reflected the racism and sexism and poverty that I saw around me” as a child of Delisle, Mississippi. The author of Men We Reaped, a memoir that recounts the deaths of five young African-American men in Ward’s life within the context of race and class in the South, will give the fourth annual Distinguished Frey Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Woldenberg Art Center’s Freeman Auditorium on the Tulane campus.

Friday / NOEW is NOW: We’ve been writing about the Road to NOEW for a couple of weeks now — and it’s finally here. The 7th annual New Orleans Entrepreneur Week gets underway Friday, March 20. Kick off the eight-day, 100+ speaker entrepreneurial extravaganza at the Fulton Street festival grounds with music, drinks, bowling, and bites at Fulton Alley from 8–10 p.m. Learn more and register here.

Saturday / Body art: The New Orleans Tattoo Museum and Studio unveils its opening exhibition, Folklore and Flash, tcreated around the personal archives of “Doc” Don Lucas, an artist and electric-tattooing historian who came to New Orleans 30+ years ago, influencing two generations of tattoo artists. The museum part of the institution is dedicated to the history of tattooing in New Orleans, and strives to give visitors an awareness of the people, technologies, traditions and influences of modern tattooing. Future exhibits will build on this foundation to explore specific artists, cultures, and technologies that have emerged in New Orleans. The museum is open from 1 to 7 p.m. Saturday at 1915 1/2 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Sunday: History project: Last Call: New Orleans Dyke Bar History Project will release the first episode of an innovative new podcast, along with a corresponding live performance, as part of the Patois International Human Rights Film Festival. The first episode, Prologue: Coming Out Stories, tells the coming out stories of five New Orleanians in their own words. Future episodes will explore intersectionality, gender dynamics, police brutality, and activism. The podcast runs 20-30 minutes and is produced by Rachel Lee, Peter Bowling, and Free Feral. The event will take place on Sunday, March 22, at Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center (1618 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd.). Doors will open at 4:30 pm with the podcast and performance to begin at 5. The podcast will be available on Podbean, iTunes and lastcallnola.org following the launch.