Erica Lord
The Codes We Carry: Beads as DNA Data
January 9 - February 7, 2025
Lecture and Reception
January 14, 2025, 5:30-6:30 pm (Wilson Hall’s Concert Hall)
Diabetes Burden Strap (Blue), 2024 at golden hour; Photo: Erica Lord. Image Courtesy of the Artist and Accola Griefen Fine Art.
About the Exhibition
Erica Lord’s large-scale beaded sculptures and related prints draw on computer-produced genetic data, or DNA/RNA microarrays, from diseases disproportionately affecting Indigenous communities. Lord transforms these images into loom-woven sculptures as an act of data sovereignty. The sculptures take the form of Alaskan Athabaskan burden straps or baby belts, an ancient technology allowing a person to carry heavy items, hands free. Combining culturally relevant Indigenous art forms with DNA analysis raises awareness of the institutionalized health disparities that exist for Native people.
Erica Lord is an interdisciplinary artist who draws on her experience of growing up between Alaska and Upper Michigan and her mixed-race cultural identity drawn from Athabaskan, Iñupiat, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese, and English descent. Lord is an enrolled member of Nenana Native Village. Lord has exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Sant Fe, NM; the Musée du Quai Branley, Paris; the National Gallery of Canada; the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and The Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Lord is represented by Accola Griefen Fine Art.
This exhibition is co-sponsored by the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics as part of the Center’s 2024-2025 program, which focuses on ‘How We Live and Die: Stories, Values, and Communities.’ The exhibition is also made possible by the support of the Native American and Indigenous Cohort, along with the Departments of History, Biology, Environmental Studies, and the Class of ’63 Fund Scholars-in-Residence Program administered by the Provost’s Office.
Staniar Gallery