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 (Wilson Hall's Concert Hall)

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.

Visit the artist's website: https://ericalord.com/

This exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of The Roger Mudd Center for Ethics, the Department of Art and Art History, the History Department, the Biology Department, Environmental Studies, the Native American and Indigenous Cohort, and the Class of '63 Scholars-in-Residence Program administered by the Provost's Office.