W&L’s Staniar Gallery Presents Erica Lord’s ‘The Codes We Carry: Beads as DNA Data’ The solo exhibition will open Jan. 9 with an artist’s talk slated for Jan. 14.

Office of Communications and Public Affairs
December 17, 2024

Washington and Lee University’s Staniar Gallery is pleased to present “The Codes We Carry: Beads as DNA Data,” a solo exhibition by artist Erica Lord. The exhibit will be on view from Jan. 9 through Feb. 7. Lord will also give a public lecture as part of W&L’s Mudd Center for Ethics series on “How We Live & Die” on Tuesday, Jan. 14 at 5:30 p.m. in Wilson Concert Hall in the Lenfest Center for the Arts.

The exhibition and lecture are free and open to the public.

Lord is an interdisciplinary artist who 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.

“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. 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. By combining culturally relevant Indigenous art forms with DNA analysis, Lord aims 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. Lord is represented by Accola Griefen Fine Art. The video in this exhibition is generously provided by the filmmaker Kaela Waldstein.

This exhibition is co-sponsored by the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics 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 about the 2024-25 exhibition and programming schedule, visit Staniar Gallery’s website.

Staniar Gallery is located on the second floor of Wilson Hall, in Washington and Lee University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts. When the campus is open to the public, gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, please call 540-458-8861.