Uploaded January 2025 | Updated September 2026, 20 hours ago
Erica Lord, Multimedia artist at the Institute of American Indian Arts
Public Lecture Title: The Codes We Carry: Beads as DNA Data
Erica Lord is an interdisciplinary artist who explores concepts and issues that exist within a contemporary Indigenous experience, including how culture and identity operate in a rapidly changing world. Lord 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. To address a multiple or mixed identity, Lord uses a variety of mediums to construct new, ambiguous, or challenging representations of race and culture.
The Codes We Carry: Beadwork as DNA Data is a series of sculptural objects combining traditional Indigenous art forms and techniques with DNA analysis to raise awareness of health disparities for Native people.
Erica Lord, Multimedia artist at the Institute of American Indian Arts
Public Lecture Title: The Codes We Carry: Beads as DNA Data
Erica Lord is an interdisciplinary artist who explores concepts and issues that exist within a contemporary Indigenous experience, including how culture and identity operate in a rapidly changing world. Lord 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. To address a multiple or mixed identity, Lord uses a variety of mediums to construct new, ambiguous, or challenging representations of race and culture.
The Codes We Carry: Beadwork as DNA Data is a series of sculptural objects combining traditional Indigenous art forms and techniques with DNA analysis to raise awareness of health disparities for Native people.
