The Great Rivers Biennial Art Award (GRB)—a collaborative initiative between CAM and the Gateway Foundation—recognizes and fosters artistic talent in the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. The artists selected receive $25,000 in unrestricted funding and are featured in the Great Rivers Biennial exhibition every two years at CAM. Since 2003, the GRB has recognized the standout creative voices of 33 local artists in our region.
For the 2026 Biennial, artists Vaughn Davis Jr., Lauren dela Roche, and Vincent Stemmler have proposed ambitious exhibitions that involve a range of media including sculpture, painting, installation, and multimedia assemblage. The three award winners were unanimously selected by a distinguished panel of independent jurors: Leslie Hewitt, artist and Associate Professor of Art at Rice University in Houston; Margot Norton, Chief Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley; and Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The jurors made the selection after visiting the studios of ten semifinalist artists who were chosen from a pool of 93 applicants.
Great Rivers Biennial 2026 is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Dean Daderko, Ferring Foundation Chief Curator, and Misa Jeffereis, Associate Curator, with support from Grace Early, Exhibitions Assistant.

Installation view, Vaughn Terrell Davis
Jr.: Black Orchids, Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco, 2025. Photo courtesy Romer Young Gallery.

Vaughn Terrell Davis Jr. Our memories lost in the fugue, 2023. Acrylic, pigment, aerosol, dye, and photo transfer on canvas. Installation view of Vaughn Terrell Davis
Jr.: Black Orchids, Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco, 2025. Photo courtesy Romer Young Gallery.
Vaughn Terrell Davis Jr. is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in St. Louis. His practice expands the language of painting by engaging directly with its physical deconstruction. His works embody ideas of rupture, transformation, and resistance, often suspended or draped from wall to floor—existing between painting and sculpture. Organic and open-ended in form, the pieces are shaped by gravity and tension, revealing new structures through acts of distressing, tearing, and removal.

Lauren Dela Roche, Feminine Echoes of the Pastoral Underground, 2024. Acrylic on found cotton feed sack. Courtesy the artist. Photo courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery.

Lauren Dela Roche, Chain of Rocks, 2024. Acrylic on found cotton feed sack. Courtesy the artist. Photo courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery.
Lauren dela Roche is a self-described queer punk feminist artist whose autodidactic approach integrates a broad range of references, including zines, European modernisms, and autobiography. Though largely self-taught, her consumption of visual culture and art history allows her to draw upon long artistic traditions, remixing diverse sources ranging from Egon Schiele’s line work, transgressive cinema, Persian miniatures, Greek mythology to folklore.

Vincent Stemmler, Stillness, 2018. Concrete, rebar, dried plant specimen, plastic bottle, butterfly. Installation view of Sticks in the Mud, Florissant Valley Contemporary Art Gallery, 2020. Photo: Chris Bauer.

Vincent Stemmler, Three Columns, 2023. Ceramic, glaze, concrete, rebar, paint, deer bones, live native plants, found objects and architectural replications from the surrounding neighborhood of the work’s original installation. Installation view of Counterpublic, St. Louis, 2023. Courtesy the artist.
Vincent Stemmler is a multidisciplinary artist whose work engages with found materials—ranging from manmade objects and detritus to natural elements like sticks and stones—to explore the complex relationships between environment, identity, and transformation. Working across mediums of sculpture, installation, photography, collage, and mold-based processes, Stemmler’s practice is rooted in the act of collecting and recontextualizing what the world leaves behind.