First Friday: Celebrating Lauren dela Roche

Enjoy art, music, and culture in the Grand Center Arts District on the first Friday of the month. This event celebrates Great Rivers Biennial 2026 artist Lauren del Roche. Drop-in and make watercolor paintings on found paper, echoing dela Roche’s materials and process, while enjoying light bites and a live music set from Jane Wave. Schedule 5:00 pm Doors open / Bar opens 6:00–8:30 pm Music by Jane Wave and drop-in art activity About the Artists Photo: Macayli Hausmann. Lauren dela Roche (b. 1983, Santa Rosa, CA) 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 and transgressive cinema to Persian miniatures, Greek mythology, and folklore. Dela Roche’s recent work—painted on found, mended, and repurposed cotton feed sacks—shows multiplying, echoing views of a nude woman, a recurring central character. In her iconic, fresh style, her work ties deeply to the land, agriculture, ecology, and systems of caretaking. For nearly a decade, dela Roche lived off the grid in Northern Minnesota, building a cabin from found materials and becoming fully self-reliant through farming. She is the recipient of several grants and residencies, including a 2024 Joan Mitchell Center residency in New Orleans. Dela Roche is represented by Eric Firestone Gallery in New York. Her work is found in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the North Dakota Museum of Art, and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, among others. She has resided in the Midwest since young adulthood and currently lives and works near St. Louis. Jane Wave is the solo experimental project of Sam Pounders, a self-taught sound artist based in St. Louis, Missouri. Producing songs in a home studio, Jane Wave experiments with vocals, bass-heavy pop rhythms, found sounds and instrument loops. Weaving traditional music, primitive punk, no wave and abstract sound, Wave’s performances are coordinated and improvised. Wave has performed for the last 10 years in the St. Louis area, both as a solo musician and as a member in bands such as Swear Beam, Fried E.M. and Pineapple RnR. Her recent album, Quality Time is available for streaming on Subvert FM and Bandcamp; a tape release is forthcoming in late 2026.