The Staniar Gallery collaborated with the Mudd Center for Ethics to bring colorful glass-beaded sculptures, inspired by DNA and RNA structures of diseases that impact Native Americans, to Washington and Lee University.
Erica Lord’s exhibit, “The Codes We Carry: Beadwork as DNA Data” opened to the public on Jan. 9 as a part of the Mudd Center’s 2024-2025 series, “How We Live and Die.”
Lord is a multimedia artist of Alaskan Native descent. She descends from the Athabaskan and Iñupiat people and is a member of the Nenana Native Village. In her exhibit, Lord uses her art to explore the health disparities that Native Americans face and their history of medical mistreatment.
The main subject of Lord’s artwork is the burden strap, an accessory found in several Native tribes that helps mothers carry their children or other heavy objects.
“I started to question, ‘What’s my burden?’ Because I don’t carry babies or sticks and stuff, and I started thinking, ‘diabetes,’” Lord said at a lecture on Jan. 14. “There’s a lot of burdens that [Natives] have medically.”
The average estimated life expectancy for Native Americans is about 10 years less than the estimated life expectancy for White Americans, according to a 2023 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Lord said she was inspired to make something out of DNA and RNA microarrays of diseases, which are genetic data mapped out with colors, during college after one of her peers showed her how colorful they were. She started studying the colorful patterns made by the genetic data of diseases many Natives historically suffered from, such as smallpox and diabetes. Then, she used them to create burden straps and blankets out of beads.
She described it as “taking a struggle and turning it into something beautiful and sparkly.”
Lord said she also created a multiple myeloma burden strap that was inspired by her late grandmother’s experience with health care. When her grandmother fell ill, Lord said that her doctors never took her medical problems seriously.
“[My grandmother] went to the doctors and was complaining about her symptoms, and they just treated her like she was an old annoying Native woman. So they would give her Tums and send her home,” Lord recalled.
When her grandmother’s health turned for the worst, Lord said, the doctors finally started to consider serious diagnoses like cancer. However, Lord said the doctors continued to send her grandmother home with Tums. The doctors finally diagnosed her grandmother with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, a year before she passed.
Historically, the medical industry disproportionately treated Native women poorly. For example, the Indian Health Service sterilized thousands of Native women in the 1960s and 1970s without their knowledge or consent, according to a study by American Indian Quarterly.
Lord said she hopes she can get her artwork into hospitals or research centers “so that maybe a researcher will look at this and realize that maybe we have to change the way we do research [about Native health].”
Along with her Indigenous heritage, Lord also draws inspiration from her Finnish, Swedish, English and Japanese heritage. She said that growing up as a mixed person with all these racial and cultural ties shaped her identity and her art.
“I like to deal with a lot of the issues of trying to understand and challenge the idea of who and what Native people are – who and what we look like – because I thought it was interesting that people will freely tell you, ‘You don’t look Native,’” Lord said.
Along with her beadwork, the exhibit also features a series of Lord’s self-portraits called “Un/Defined” in which she changes aspects of herself such as her hair, eyes and skin to explore her racial identity. She said that these portraits not only allow her to explore her identity but also help her challenge what being Native looks like.
“My blood doesn’t change from photo to photo, but people’s response does,” she said.