Art And Design Emerge From New York Sunshine

When John “Sunshine” Margaritis asked his father for help turning yet one more crazy idea into reality, Albert Margaritis was skeptical.“I said, ‘I want to be able to put somebody in water in an environment where I can control the light 100 percent. And I want it to be this shape, and I want the front to be glass, and I want the left side glass from the waist up, and the right side glass from the waist down, so I can shoot light through it and photograph them swimming in this thing.’

“My dad said, ‘This is how we’re gonna make it, but you’re an idiot if we make this. It’s going to be expensive, and for what—your T-shirt brand?’”

They made it.

“I thought he was crazy but I wouldn’t hold him back,” said the elder Mr. Margaritis, owner of A.M. Custom Construction in Southampton. “I’ve always told him, if he can think of it, I can build it.”

The project was not without hiccups.

“My dad builds homes, but he’s never made a cement tank with glass on three sides. First the cement blew out the back of the mold,” Mr. Margaritis remembered. “Then, when the tank was half full of water, the front piece of glass blew out. It was total trial and error. But we made it, and I was able to photograph models in this crazy sculpture that we made. The imagery was so elevated.”

That imagery appeared on New York Sunshine screen-printed tees in a 2016 line called “Head Above Water,” but it also helped launch a fledgling Southampton startup into the international limelight.

“After the One Ton Tank—which is actually three tons after it’s filled with water—I realized he sees something I don’t see,” said Albert Margaritis. “He has a vision and I have to respect that. It’s my job to figure out how to execute it.”

The tank became part of the Watermill Center’s 2016 Summer Benefit and Auction.

“By staging these performers inside this structure, which essentially stemmed from a fashion project—which speaks to inherent seasonality, decay, waste—there was an interesting tension in the idea of craft and virtuosity,” said Ivan Cheng, one of the event curators. “To have the laws of physics and survival of the human body alongside the ‘living’ and abject concrete tank was a quiet spectacle.”

A photo of the tank made it into the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the event. “It was amazing, and it was great that we were getting some recognition. But the question was how to turn what we were doing into a business,” Mr. Margaritis said.

Mr. Margaritis, now 31, started the company on a whim as a high schooler in Roslyn. He designed a few shirts, and a friend of his father silk-screened them. “He was doing silk screens for people like Warhol and Keith Haring, and he had all this art on his walls that I think influenced the stuff I’m doing now. It gave me this respect for screen printing as an art form.”

In 2012, Luke O’Connor came on board. He taught at Flying Point Surf School with Mr. Margaritis in the summers and has worked full-time with New York Sunshine since graduating from college in 2017.

The team’s first foray away from T-shirts came about when Mr. Margaritis—equally passionate about surfing and basketball—painted a hoop and backboard in his mother’s kitchen in 2014. Photos ensued, more hoops were painted. Then one hoop found its way into the ocean.

“I wanted to make something visual that showed, in a 30-second clip, what New York Sunshine is, in my mind. So I talked to my dad about how I could get this hoop to stay in the waves out where we surf. We did it at Road G [in Southampton Village] and we used like 2,000 pounds of sandbags, and had a lot of friends helping us. And we had this basketball hoop standing vertically in the ocean.”

Photos from that fall 2015 project inspired Mr. Margaritis to further combine his two loves into hoops adorned with photos he took of the ocean, built of wood and Plexiglas.

He hung that first sculpture in his shop on Nugent Street in Southampton in the summer of 2016. “People were interested and asked about buying it, so we sold a few of them.”

That melding of art and commerce was solidified when New York Sunshine participated in Miami Beach’s Art Basel in 2015 with High Tide, an exhibition space featuring 300 hand-dyed T-shirts hanging from 120 feet of wavy shelving. “They went from white to deep blue as you got deeper into the space. We covered the floor with sand and put a boardwalk down the middle.”

“People keep saying retail is dead, no one is going to stores,” Mr. Margaritis said. “I want to do stuff that makes you want to buy this T-shirt because you want to remember the experience. I want to make things that make you want to go to the store. So the clothing becomes a souvenir of the experience.”

In 2016, New York Sunshine brought five concrete and glass tanks to Art Basel as part of a collaborative exhibit with Nike, introducing a shoe by the streetwear company VLONE. White basketballs float in the tanks at different heights.

They left the tanks in Miami Beach and repurposed them the following winter, in an exhibit titled “Caution,” which featured the tanks in various states of destruction, accompanied by photos of a burning basketball hoop printed on industrial light boxes.

“A friend of mine, Virgil Abloh, who’s now the creative director for Louis Vuitton, came by and photographed it, and put it up on Instagram,” Mr. Margaritis said. “Since that weekend, we’ve gotten consistent work.”

“The payoff is starting to happen,” Mr. O’Connor said. “We’ve invested all this time and effort, and now people are emailing us saying, ‘We’ve been following you,’ or ‘We saw your high-tide thing,’ or ‘One of our designers saw the thing at the Watermill Center, then we saw the five tanks down in Miami, and now we want you to do something for us.’”

In January, New York Sunshine got a call from Unknwn the Miami streetwear store owned by LeBron James. “They called and said, ‘Do you do store design?’” Mr. Margaritis recalled, “and we were like, ‘We design our little 300-square-foot store in Southampton. Sure, we can do that.’ So we’re redesigning that store now.

“The best thing is that we’re getting hired just to design. We’re going to build a few things that are more high-end design pieces, but the overall construction we’re not doing. So we can just oversee this without it taking up all my time.”

The pieces New York Sunshine is building for Unknwn are largely concrete.

“We’re doing a lot of concrete fixtures—it’s very industrial,” Mr. Margaritis said. “There were a few things we presented that they said were a little over the top for them, which I understand. I’m trying to push the envelope a bit.”

“We always go back to working with what might be considered low-end materials in a high-end way,” Mr. O’Connor added. “It’s construction. It’s real.”

By early spring, New York Sunshine found itself in an unusual space—more demand than the company could handle. Its T-shirts were being sold in boutiques in Paris; they’d been featured in Vogue and in HypeBeast.

In March, Foot Locker contacted them to help launch a new shoe, the Shark—seemingly a perfect fit for New York Sunshine’s surfing/basketball focus. But Mr. Margaritis and Mr. O’Connor were hesitant.

“It’s a mall brand, and that’s not where we want to be,” Mr. Margaritis explained. “I want to do high-end stuff. So we went back and forth with Foot Locker, and we decided to do it if we could do something really un-commercial.

“We really were busy at the time, too,” he added. “I had been working on these long glass basketballs for my first real art show in the Stem Gallery in Brussels, and the Foot Locker event was a week and a half before the art show. But we pulled it off.

“We took all these shoe boxes and put them in this shark tank. We rented a big crane and hoisted the tank up in an empty lot in Brooklyn. We had big screens with videos of sharks swimming around, and we cut up the shoes like they had been bitten by sharks and spread them all over the lot.

“They used the videos on their Instagram and other social media accounts,” Mr. Margaritis said. “In my opinion, it was very forward-thinking of them to hire someone like us. They’re thinking in the direction everything is going.”

Then Golden Goose Deluxe Brand, a high-end athletic shoe brand based in Venice, came calling. The company’s creative director visited New York Sunshine in its loft above Albert Margaritis’s workshop.

They were invited to Venice in July and do an installation with Golden Goose Deluxe Brand for the Venice Biennale Architettura.

“When we left here, the thought was that we were going to do a couple of guerrilla installations and get behind-the-scenes footage,” Mr. O’Connor said. “But we got there and they were like, ‘All right, tomorrow we’re going to look at locations we picked for you.’ They had changed the parameters and it was like, ‘Make a fashion film for this.’”

“It was chaotic, but it’s the way we work,” Mr. Margaritis added. “We got there and we figured it out. It was wild. We flooded the floor of this medieval church—it’s not an active church; it gets rented out for events. We used a black pool liner so nothing would get destroyed, and we filmed a seven-part video series as their major campaign for the fall.”

“Working with them was very organic and creatively fast,” noted a spokesperson for Golden Goose Deluxe Brand. “We ended up having what we wanted after one week of intense work and intense fun. They elevate ‘work of hands’ to a state of art, while creating powerful visuals with a strong potential to be ‘viral.’”

As for the future, about the only thing Mr. Margaritis is sure about is that he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed.

“I want to do everything—I want to keep working on fun, interesting projects, and I have major goals of putting on massive art shows, and designing runways in Paris for fashion week, and at the same time putting out a little T-shirt line.”

New York Sunshine’s 2018 line of T-shirt and related wear, Silver Sunshine, can be found at 91 Main Street in Southampton, where the company is sharing space with TENET, or online atnewyorksunshine.com