Andrea Grover is bustling around her kitchen, which flows into a cozy-mod living area. It's a space her father designed as a home addition behind the East Sunset Heights chapel that housed the Aurora Picture Show, an institution she directed for 10 years.

She is describing her next move, which has been speculated upon in part because of a recent Swamplot.com post that noted her house was on the market.

"I'm very excited about moving to eastern Long Island, probably to the town of Sag Harbor, which is near the Hamptons but not as expensive," she explains. "The reason for the move is, almost three years ago, my mom, who is now in her 80s, had an aneurysm.

"I was running Aurora at the time, and my husband and I have two young kids. It was one of those phone calls where I thought, 'OK, I might not even make it home,' because it was so critical."

It was at that point that Grover determined to move to Long Island to be closer to her parents there. Eastern Long Island has long been a haven for creative minds, including John Alexander, Willem de Kooning and Donald Sultan, ever since Jackson Pollock founded his studio there over a half-century ago. "What I'll be doing out there is yet to be determined," she adds. She has several leads on arts organizations there, and is particularly interested in Robert Wilson's Watermill Center.

She reaches into the fridge and reappears holding a small carton.

"Is soy creamer okay?"

Aurora Picture Show is among the gems of Houston's art world — the city's only microcinema that is responsible for exposing vast audiences to the spectrum of film as art and vice versa. The organization is Grover's brainchild.

The community organizer landed in Houston in 1995 for a tenure at the MFAH's Glassell School Core Program. Following her time there, she located a church building on Aurora Street (where she currently lives) and began to show movies informally with a small mailing list — a home theater of sorts. The timing was a pivotal moment, as it coincided with the advent of inexpensive desktop video editing, enabling amateur filmmakers to explore new media.

"There was all this new technology — but no venue to show the films," she explains. "This was 1998, before YouTube, so the idea of even putting a video online was really cumbersome."

For the inaugural film she screened in the church's interior, she dispatched 50 invitations. Over 100 guests appeared at the event. The first shows were all shorts focusing on work that was 30 minutes or less. She elaborates, "This was work that didn't have an obvious outlet — not quite film festival material, not quite gallery material — it was certainly not movie house material.

"And what we found is that Houston has a real attachment to novelty," she adds with a tone of tribute as she sits down at her kitchen table.

A little idea turns into a movement

She describes Aurora's arrival as "part of a zeitgeist fostering microcinemas in the mid-1990s. People were opening microcinemas in bookshops, cafes, back rooms of galleries, pizza shops, funeral homes — anywhere." She recalls logging on to AltaVista.com in the pre-Google age and searching "little cinema." What she found was an exploding, nation-wide movement of "microcinemas."

Grover also tapped into the emerging indie scene in Houston.

"I was inspired by places like Notsuoh, which Jim Pirtle opened in 1996, and Jeff Elrod, who was an MFAH core fellow and opened a place very heroically called Art of the Century in an abandoned driver's ed storefront."

She also lists Mark Allen as a catalyst in the underground network via his art gallery, Revolution Summer, run out of his second story apartment on Marconi St., along with Delfina Vannucci, who opened a gallery in her living room. Grover recalls, "There was a lot of energy expressing, 'I have an extra closet — would you like to mount an exhibition in it?' "

That original spark for co-opting a commercial space came from 1960s art like Gordon Matta-Clark's community-operated, conceptual SoHo eatery, Food. Grover suggests that that spirit persists in Houston, citing artist-run spaces like the Joanna, Box 13 and Temporary Space.

Regarding her July relocation, Grover says, "Of course I'll miss Houston. This is my community. But I think everyone has their own personal narrative connecting to their parents' lives."

Marathon over, new adventure begins

Grover paved a well-planned path for her exit from Aurora two years ago, in which she developed an executive director succession plan — a model that is the subject of a forthcoming study on successful succession plans in arts organizations. In her professional life, Grover communicates a singular thoughtfulness, most evident in her conscious avoidance of "Founder's Syndrome" — a malady she describes as "when an organization's founder stays on too long and the organization starts to struggle and becomes unable to evolve into the next stage of development."

Indeed, the role of founding director of Aurora was all-consuming, involving coordinating screenings all over the city, hosting artists in her home and transporting them to Aurora-organized screenings in other Texas cities. In 2001, she found herself screening a film in her home when her first child was only six days old. "Basically, I was running a marathon for 10 years, and I loved it."

She conducts a pan of the dwelling's interior and adds, "These are the best memories of my professional life. And it's a home, too. It's a living thing for me."

Since her farewell from Aurora, Grover has been teaching and operating as an independent "migrant" curator, organizing exhibitions at The Menil Collection, New York's Dia Art Foundation, and Carnegie Mellon University.

"My interest right now is in archives that are part of an arts organization or a museum," she explains, "because just like that moment in the mid-1990s when suddenly everyone was making videos, now you have institutions all over the country that record their events in video and audio — every public event gets recorded and goes into the archives." Grover enjoys digging around the basements' archives, "finding historical gems," and airing them for the public.

Her first stab at independent curating was at Apex Art with a show entitled, Phantom Captain: Art and Crowd Sourcing about the manner in which artists use network communication to create large scale collaborative artworks —fitting, as the theme of collaboration runs throughout her entire career, as evidenced in Aurora's primary practices.

"In the beginning, just remodeling this place from a shag carpet, drop-ceiling church into a public building was an effort that we had people volunteering for from every angle," Grover says.

"That's what I love about art — the idea of creating together."

In terms of the future of her property, which is listed for $409,000, Grover jokes about converting the sanctuary into an Yves Klein Chapel that would play "La révolution bleue" on loop. In either case, she hopes that a new owner maintains the creative spirit of the building, which has played host to memorials, naming ceremonies and weddings.

No matter its future, the former church at 800 Aurora St. will hold a place in the Houston art community's collective memory as the site of an artistic generation's rites of passage.