Erica Lord

Erica Lord (born 1978) is an Alaska Native artist, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who identifies herself as a mixed-race "cultural limbo."

Life Born to a Finnish-American mother and Iñupiaq/Athabascan father, Erica Lord grew up traveling between her father's village in Nenana, Alaska and her mother's home community in Michigan. Her personal experience perpetually moving between various geographic places inspires her work's interest in themes of displacement, cultural identity and cultural limbo. She is a citizen of the Nenana Native Association, a federally recognized Alaska Native tribe.

She received a B.A. in liberal arts and studio arts from Carleton College in 2001 and completed her M.F.A. in sculpture and photography at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006.

Identity

Career

Erica Lord has been an exhibiting artist since 2004, with her work having been featured in galleries and museums across the United States from Santa Fe to New York. She has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at the DeVos Museum of Art (Marquette, MI) and the Alaska Native Arts Foundation Gallery (Anchorage, AK), as well as in group exhibitions such as the Havana Biennial and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native American Art. She currently teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts where she has contributed to building some of the school's first MFA classes to launch their MFA program. During the pandemic she continued to work on her most recent project called “Burden Strap” inspired by traditional beaded burden straps and beading them in the pattern of DNA and RNA strands of diseases that affect Native American people disproportionately. From this series, “Leukemia Burden Strap” and “Multiple Myeloma Burden Strap” were featured pieces in the Sharing Honors and Burdens: Renwick Invitational 2023. Due to her profound work on Native American issues, she was one of thirteen feature artists in Self-Determined: A Contemporary Survey of Native and Indigenous Artists in 2022. 2020 Maajiigin wa’aw akiing miinawaa (Begin This World Again): Gina Adams, Erica Lord, Merritt Johnson, at Accola Griefen Fine Art, New York, NY 2018 The New Red Order: The Savage Philosophy of Endless Acknowledgement, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 2007-2017 Our people, Our land, Our images: International Indigenous Photographers, on tour through ExhibitsUSA, a national program of Mid-America Arts Alliance 2010 Dry Ice, Museum of Contemporary Native American Art, Santa Fe, NM An installation of prayer bundles made from the red cloth of the United States' Star Spangled Banner 2007 Off the Map: Landscape and the Native Imagination, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY

Selected works

Native American Land Reclamation Project (2000) One of Lord's earliest projects, in 2000, focuses on her Native American roots. In her installation Native American Land Reclamation Project, she employs mixed media objects to bring awareness to the repeated cycle of broken U.S. treaties, specifically with Native Americans from 1778 to 1886. In an interview, Lord explains, "I started thinking about what in my culture has been repeated over and over. [...] I wanted to create a piece that both acknowledged our history– and stressing both oppressor & survivor, Native & non-Native, it's a shared history."

Un/Defined Self-Portrait Series (2005), C-prints of variable dimension

Untitled (Tattooed Arms) (2007), Digital Photographs Erica Lord photographs two tattoos: one on the inner side of her left forearm titled “Enrollment number” and one on her right forearm titled “Blood Quantum.” These two tattoos criticize the Native American image created by modern society. Lord's tattoo titled “Blood Quantum,” after the blood quantum laws, is a visual criticism on the United States government control on all Native American heritage. Placing this number on her arm, Erica Lord draws direct comparison to Holocaust survivors and their experiences to the United States expansion and relocation of Native Americans. This piece was a reenactment of American artist James Luna's Artifact Piece,