In February of 2012, partners Murray Moss and Franklin Getchell closed their globally renowned Greene Street store, and inaugurated moss bureau, leveraging their two decades of experience.

Murray Moss

In the September 2011 issue of the international design and culture magazine, Wallpaper, Mr. Moss was listed as one of the “150 people who have most influenced, inspired and improved the way we live, work and travel over the last 15 years”.

In the December 2011 issue of the international magazine, Art + Auction, Murray Moss was included in the magazine’s list, “Most Powerful People in the Art World”.

In the April 2012 issue of Metropolis magazine, Jennifer Kabat writes in her feature story, ‘Murray’s Next Act’, “... Moss is no ordinary mortal, but one who has defined the design decade, who helps to see how we see objects”.

Murray Moss is the founder and creative mind behind the internationally renowned Moss design gallery, established in 1994 in what was then New York’s SoHo art district. Becoming an ‘anchor/destination’, Moss gallery is acknowledged to have been the infamous catalyst for the rapid metamorphosis of that entire district from art galleries to a design district.

Moss, a former fashion entrepreneur, in 1990 set out to elevate the public’s criteria for evaluating industrial product design, expanding the definition of ‘good design’, and illuminating the multitude of briefs designers usually bring to a project. His agenda was not only to discover those ‘bonus’ narrative elements in the material world, but also to invent more effective ways of exposing them to the general public, so that they become not only evident, but valued.

Deliberately blurring the distinctions between industrial production and studio craft, between utilitarian objects and art, and more recently, between ‘Modernist’ tenants and the current resurgence of the Decorative Arts, in order to boost a more open, fresh response, the Moss SoHo store’s highly eclectic, aggressively curated, ‘museum-like’ presentations, incorporating both humour and surprise as well as a highly informed familiarity with the subject, changed almost daily. During the past 18 years, Murray Moss conceived and curated over 100 highly influential exhibitions, at Moss as well as other venues, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Museum fur Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt.

In February of 2012, partners Murray Moss and Franklin Getchell closed their Greene Street store, and inaugurated Moss Bureau, a design consultancy providing a multiplicity of services to manufacturers, design studios, and architectural firms, as well as offering curatorial and interior design services. Moss Bureau will also assist private and institutional collectors of contemporary design in an advisory and curatorial capacity, based on two decades of experience as well as continuous current research.

Through its many collaborations over the years, Moss established strong relationships with international artists, designers, and manufacturers (both established and emerging), including Tupperware (USA), Baccarat (France), Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres (France), FLOS (Italy), Studio Job (Belgium), artist Hella Jongerius (The Netherlands/Germany), artist Gaetano Pesce (Italy/USA), artist Maarten Baas (The Netherlands), artists Fernando and Humberto Campana (Brazil), Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg (Germany), artist Tord Boontje (The Netherlands/UK), J.& L. Lobmeyr (Austria), and Swarovski AG (Austria).

Murray Moss is a frequent guest speaker at art academies and universities, as well as cultural institutions around the country, including the Neue Galerie, the Smithsonian Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Parsons School of Design, the Wolfsonian-FIU Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hammer Museum. In 2002, Mr. Moss was invited to be a Speaker at the TED12 Conference.

Mr. Moss has served on the Boards of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA). Mr. Moss has been acknowledged through numerous awards in his field, including the 2002 Chrysler Design Award and Russel Wright Award, House Beautiful’s 2000 Giants of Design Award, and Metropolitan Home’s 2004 Modernism Award. In 2007 he was inducted into Interior Design Magazine’s Hall of Fame. 

(photo: Matthew Williams/Elle Decor Italia)

Franklin Getchell 

Franklin Getchell came to Moss in 1997 from the world of luxury television. An Emmy Award winning producer, in his television career he was responsible for more than eight hundred hours of quality programming which appeared on all of the major broadcast networks except Fox (NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS) plus HBO. In addition to producing, he was also a director, and a writer of more than a hundred hours of network programming.

Immediately prior to joining the company, Getchell was General Manager for four cable/satellite channels in the UK, including the industry’s first channel to target teenagers, named Trouble, which he created and launched. Before moving to London, he was at Children's Television Workshop for thirteen years, six as overall head of television, responsible for Sesame Street and all other CTW programming.  He created Encyclopedia, the company’s only series for HBO, and CRO, their first animated series for commercial television.

His professional expertise extends to marketing and branding, business development and corporate management. His company, Getchell Intellectual, had clients in both the public and private sectors, and while in the UK, he had a regular column in Broadcast, the industry weekly newspaper. He was a frequent speaker at media conferences, festivals and tradeshows.

In addition to an Emmy, he has received more than thirty other honors, including seven Emmy nominations, a Peabody, a Christopher, and the Japan Prize. And, like Murray, he is a former actor, though he has also held the following jobs: advertising copywriter, limo driver, stock market clerk, carpenter, roofer, print model, sign painter, voiceover artist, real estate broker, office manager for a gay porn company, librarian, general contractor, executive secretary and psychology experiment subject.

(photo: Mark Mahaney/Metropolis)