Erica Lord is the Next Speaker in the Mudd Lecture Series Lord, a multimedia artist at the Institute of American Indian Arts, will give a lecture on Jan. 14 at 5:30 p.m. in Wilson Concert Hall.

By Emily Innes
January 7, 2025

Erica Lord, a multimedia artist at the Institute of American Indian Arts, will present a lecture on Jan. 14 at 5:30 p.m. in Wilson Concert Hall in the Lenfest Center of the Arts as part of W&L’s Mudd Center for Ethics’ series on “How We Live & Die.”

Lord’s lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “The Codes We Carry: Beads as DNA Data,” and is presented in conjunction with her current exhibit in the Staniar Gallery, on view through Feb. 7.

Lord’s interdisciplinary art draws on her experience growing up between Alaska and 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.

“I first came across Lord’s stunning beaded burden straps when I visited the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in October 2023,” said Melissa Kerin, the director of the Mudd Center. “Her artwork quickly became the inspiration for and fulcrum of this year’s theme on medical ethics as it touches on issues of access, justice and inclusion within the medical system.”

Lord credits her cultural limbo and precarious balances with molding her identity and fueling her art, and the complicated idea of “home” is often reflected in her work. Migration and rootlessness are part of the American experience, but Lord contextualizes her own multicultural experience within the larger history of the Native diaspora. For Lord, the cyclical repetition of leaving and returning home divides the idea of one’s self into multiple perspectives; her art explores the complexity of these mixed experiences and represents “an evolution of new ways to demonstrate cultural identity beyond a strictly two-worlds discourse.”

In her art, Lord uses a variety of mediums to explore a multiple or mixed identity and create representations of race and culture. Her exploration of contemporary Indigenous experience can be seen in her Staniar Gallery exhibit, “The Codes We Carry: Beads as DNA Data,” which she will discuss during her Jan. 14 lecture. “The Codes We Carry” is a series of large-scale beaded sculptures and related prints. Lord takes computer-produced genetic data (DNA/RNA microarrays) from diseases disproportionately affecting Indigenous communities and transforms these images into loom-woven sculptures as an act of data sovereignty. She combines culturally relevant Indigenous art forms with DNA analysis to raise awareness of the institutionalized health disparities that exist for Native people.

Lord has exhibited at several institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Sante Fe), 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 of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She currently lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico, where she continues her art practice and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Lord is represented by Accola Griefen Fine Art.

Lord’s visit is co-sponsored by the Staniar Gallery and supported by W&L’s Native American Indigenous Cohort within the Office of Inclusion and Engagement, the Department of Biology, the Department of Environmental Studies, the Department of History, and the Class of 1963 Scholars in Residence Program administered by the Provost’s Office.

For more information and a complete schedule of events, visit the series webpage.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the university from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. Previous Mudd Center lecture series topics have included Global Ethics in the 21st Century, Race and Justice in America, The Ethics of Citizenship, Markets and Morals, Equality and Difference, The Ethics of Identity, The Ethics of Technology, Daily Ethics and Beneficence, and the Ethics of Design.