Andrea & Wilma at the Ponderosa.

By JAMES SALOMON August 5th, 2026

My heart is a dance hall just off the road.

A twisted mesquite, standing alone.

Swaying in time.

The good, bad, and all.

My heart is a dance hall.

– James Steinle

It's high season in the Hamptons, and I have the opportunity to sit down with Andrea Grover, executive director of Guild Hall in East Hampton. To say she's a dynamo is an understatement, she's admired as someone who really knows how to bring a community together through her vision and fostering the visions of those in art, music, dance,  theatre, film, literature, and anyone else who takes on the gallery or stage.

We're at her home in Sag Harbor, where I once photographed her with husband Carlos and pooch named Romeo for HC&G magazine. Lots has happened since then, as time goes, and she recently turned her living room into The Ponderosa Lounge, hosting what feels somewhat like a makeshift variety show where people enjoy the moment and don't take themselves too seriously. Doesn't that sound like a breath of fresh air?

JS: Let's talk about your new pet project, The Ponderosa Lounge. How did this come about?

AG: In April 2018, I took a group of Guild Hall patrons to Austin to see the newly opened Ellsworth Kelly Chapel. After everyone had gone to bed, the most adventurous among us, Christina Isaly, insisted our cultural education wasn't complete without a Texas dance hall.

At 10 p.m., we Ubered to The White Horse—an unadorned honky-tonk surrounded by pickup trucks. Inside, a young country singer named James Steinle played from a red velvet curtained stage while dancers of every age and orientation two-stepped across the floor.

An older cowboy named “John" took one look at us and decided we needed lessons. Minutes later, Christina and I were unabashedly clodhopping around the dance floor. For a little while, the world fell away, and all that existed was the music, laughter, and this place.

That night became the inspiration for The Ponderosa.

Laurie Anderson and Andrea Grover at Aurora Picture Show’s Aurora Award Dinner, 2003. 

JS: Speaking of Texas, you have a history in Houston by founding the Aurora Picture Show, which has grown up considerably since its humble beginnings. Along with White Horse, how did that culture and experience help inform this?

AG: Houston has no zoning laws, so when I moved there in 1995 for a Core Fellowship at the MFAH, almost every artist I knew was taking advantage of its mixed-use opportunities by opening a gallery or performance space in their home. Jeff Elrod had a space, ironically called Art of This Century (after Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery), in a former driver’s ed school which he lived in, Mark Allen had spectacular (and dangerous) events in his home on Marconi Street with groups like The Good/Bad Art Collective from Denton, TX, Rick Lowe was running Project Row Houses— art installations in abandoned shot gun houses in Houston’s Third Ward, and Nestor Topchy had a compound called Zocalo (later Templ0) that did everything from drive-in movies to a provisional artist residency in a yellow school bus. I had to get on board with the lawlessness that Houston offered us. So in 1998, I bought a recently desanctified Church of Christ for $49,000 and started showing 16mm movies (like La Jetée by Chris Marker— checked out of the public library). I lived behind the movie screen in this bare-bones one-hundred seat sanctuary, named for the street it was on: Aurora Picture Show. I asked friends to make short movies and mixed them with experimental classics from The Film-makers' Coop or Canyon Cinema or Video Data Bank. I didn’t know at the time that we were predicting the short format user-generated videos we all see on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. For fun, we incorporated audience participation (sing-a-longs, bingo, voting buttons) and the minute we had a portable projector and generator, we brought the experience outdoors to junkyards, boats, pools, and eventually museums with an adventurous spirit.
 

Alexis Rockman, Horse Latitudes, 2019
 

JS: Can we talk about some art on the walls? I'm noticing this Alexis Rockman watercolor and know the larger painting well, which was in the Guild Hall show. Tell me.

AG: When Alexis and I were working on his solo show, Shipwrecks, I told him about the “Horse Lattitudes” that I’d read about in Simon Winchester’s epic book, Atlantic. It’s an area near the equator where winds fall calm for sailing ships because of subtropical high pressure belts. As a result, ships would enter the “doldrums” for weeks and barely move— with crews running out of food and water. In desperation, they’d throw their heaviest cargo overboard or the creatures that consumed the most resources. It was rumored that these were sometimes horses, which would swim away with no land in sight. Being as sensitive as he is to animals (and angry as he is at humanity for ruining the planet), this became a perfect subject for Alexis to paint. 

 MICHAEL HALSBAND Andy Warhol & Jean-Michel Basquiat #1 July 10, 1985 Studio, New York City  Photograph by @Michael Halsband, 2025 All Rights Reserved

JS: I recently read a Basquiat quote that "Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time." This is from Michael Halsband's now famed boxing glove series. Rumor has it that you ghost curated Michael's show at the National Arts Club.

AG: Michael and I met when I was a curator at the Parrish Art Museum through our love for surf movies and we were simpatico from the get-go. I had to ghost curate his show at National Arts Club because my role at the Parrish would not allow freelance work like that, and then it  just became our thing— I helped him with three or four other exhibitions, including his show at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris in 2023. We have a visual shorthand, a lot of fun together, and a brother-sister kind of love for each other. 

 
Maria Cristina Carbonell, Green, 2019.
 

JS: Wow, this makes me think of you-know-who. Any mental connection here?

AG: This larger-than-life photograph of a parrot feather is by María Cristina Carbonell, a Venezuelan-American artist who spent seven years in the Amazon rainforest of northern Venezuela. During that time, a Yanomami shaman presented her with this ceremonial feather. "Cristina," as everyone calls her, is a friend of my sister Jo, who generously loaned us the work. It welcomes visitors at the front door, just a few feet from where my late parrotlet, Wilma, held court for years. I'd like to think of this as Wilma’s memento mori.

JS: Alright, let's get to the you-know-who. Over the winter you wrote what I consider a brave and touching story titled "Wilma" for my new book. Can you explain who she is, where she resides, what she means to you?

AG: Wilma was a rescue parrotlet I adopted for my daughters, Lola and Gigi, when they were little. What I didn't know was that parrots bond with one person. Wilma chose me. She rode around on my shoulder, disappeared into my hair, and bit anyone else who tried to touch her, including my daughters. She was my tiny guard parrot. 

When Wilma died one winter, the ground was frozen, so we put her in a black box in the garage freezer until spring. Then we forgot. She's been there for years. Every once in a while, we take her out to look at her. Amazingly, she's still perfectly preserved.

Somehow, keeping Wilma around has been comforting. As I face my own mortality—which, of course, we all do, just on different schedules—I've come to think of her as a reminder that those we love don't simply disappear. They linger in our memories, our habits, our stories... and, in Wilma's case, occasionally in the garage freezer.
 

Carlos, Andrea, and Romeo for HC&G magazine, 2020, photo by James Salomon

When I get to heaven, 

I'm gonna shake God's hand

Thank him for more blessings 

than one man can stand

Then I'm gonna get a guitar 

and start a rock-n-roll band

Check into a swell hotel, 

ain't the afterlife grand?

- John Prine

Andrea's musings on Wilma can be found in DayDreams, created and edited by James Salomon in conjunction with LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York. A book launch party will be hosted by LongHouse on Thursday, August 13th. HC&G is proud to be the media sponsor, and Whitehot's own Noah Becker is a participant.

Click HERE for more information on the book and the event.