11 Photos
Fashion of the early 1900s is on par with the costume design of "Downton Abbey." MICHELLE TRAURING
Artist Greg Miller palms the top of the surfboard, spinning it clockwise under his hand. “LUCKY,” it reads—the black font encircled by red, popping like a bullseye against the sky blue board, cut in half by a thick green stripe.
“Yeah, this is a good one,” he muses, as his business partner, John Healey, holds the opposite side and nods.
The pair can’t help but feel lucky, glancing around 16B Main Street in Sag Harbor, now home to Surfari Crossroads, a whitewashed art gallery with a collaged floor unlike any other they have ever seen. A day earlier, brown paper and blue tape had covered the windows, work benches and tools littered the space. Today, it is populated solely by surfboards.
“A surf shop in February?” a visitor said during last Saturday night’s soft opening, perusing the collection. “Anyone else see the irony here?”
It was not lost on Mr. Miller and Mr. Healey, as they watched friends, fans and collectors come and go though the falling snow. But, then again, these are not your average surfboards. And this is not your average surf shop.
Most of the surfboards are decades old—some dating back as far as the 1950s—and one of a kind. They are covered by pages torn from books, covers ripped off magazines, text, logos and photography, and then glued, painted, sprayed and resined to Mr. Miller’s liking. Outside of existing for art’s sake, each piece pays homage to the surfboards of yore, and to a culture that, in the last 10 years, has crashed rapidly on the East End.
“Surfing came out of the street and hung in there, against all odds,” Mr. Miller said the day before the opening. “‘No boards allowed.’ ‘No surfing allowed.’ ‘Must wear a shirt.’ And it’s survived. It kept going. It actually got better and better.”
Growing up in California, Mr. Miller would bike to the beach every morning, surf, and head back to his studio, where he painted large-scale canvases, repainted them and, upon completion, coated each piece in surfboard resin. By the mid-1980s, he had applied his artistic approach directly to the boards themselves—not the ones he brought into the water, but the cracked, beat-up wooden boards he found stacked in alleyways, destined for the dump.
“I would grab them and repaint them,” he said. “Give them new life.”
His 3,000-square-foot studio in Springs is lined with boards—old raw boards, completed boards and works in progress. He moved to the East End five months ago and, while house-hunting, crossed paths with Mr. Healey, the senior global real estate advisor for the Bridgehampton office of Sotheby’s International Realty. The two hit it off within five minutes, Mr. Miller said, after finding common surfing ground.
“I grew up surfing, too,” Mr. Healey said. “He gave me a board as a gift. I was, like, ‘You don’t have a gallery for this stuff?’ Surfing is such a popular thing in the Hamptons. It’s gone crazy over the last five years. I said, ‘You could easily have a gallery that does just boards. The demand warrants it.’ We’re open when we’re not surfing, and when we’re not working.”
The two-year lease will take the gallery through this summer and next, Mr. Healey said, where the boards are available for thousands of dollars each. The artist recommends hanging the boards, instead of surfing on them. But in a pinch, some of them do have fins.
“There’s just something about surfing and Mother Nature,” Mr. Healey said. “It’s pretty much completely unbiased. You could be horrible and go out there and probably have just as good a time, mentally, and have the same smile on your face as the guy who’s a professional. It’s relaxing and there’s a feeling of euphoria …”
Mr. Miller politely interrupted, a thought suddenly coming to him. “There’s also a generation of people that are making amazing art that the art world doesn’t get to,” he said. “How that parallels with surfing is, there’s something free about it. It takes some guts, and the water’s cold and it’s a little scary. Even if you don’t do a good job, you’re out there. And there’s something about that to be said.”
Surfari Crossroads is located at 16B Main Street in Sag Harbor. Hours are currently by appointment. For more information, call (631) 899-4677, or visit surfaricrossroads.com.
on Feb 17, 2015