The founder of Reflectel Mirror TVs reflects on her career in the framing business.
BY ELIZABETH GOLDFEDER
I have spent 35 years in the world of archival framing, art restoration, bespoke frame design and fabrication. In 1984, armed with art history and marketing degrees, I had ambitions into the worlds of advertising and broadcasting. After a chance meeting with the owner of a family run frame shop in Chelsea, NYC, I found myself on West 22nd Street apprenticing as a frame maker and helping to grow the small atelier that at the time framed for the Museum of American Folk Art, IBM and a bevy of downtown art collectors.
I grew up making art. My father was an artist and an art educator on Long Island. I spent weekends and summers traveling and visiting the museums of NYC and its environs. Growing up in the ’70s I was immersed in the arts and crafts era; being creative was second nature to me. I ended up taking over that small atelier and started Goldfeder Framing Group, a small art gallery and high-end archival framing studio. With my artistic abilities, common sense, and inexorable curiosity, I embarked on a lifelong passion of preserving art and designing frames, delving deep into the history of design.
Overnight I became a business owner, woodworker and finisher, and fine art handler. My small art business quickly emerged as a leader in the care, preservation, and inventive frame designs for art collectors. I was recognized by art conservators and restorers and started doing work that was showing in The Whitney, MOMA and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1990, with an expanding client base and a new name, GK Framing, I moved to a larger studio on west 20th Street in Chelsea, more than tripling my square footage. Now situated on the cusp of the chic Flatiron District where top designers lived and worked, we had access into the interior design and architectural communities.
GK Framing’s reputation grew. We became an R & D hub for materials manufactured for extending the life of art; this included products from my glass fabricator. Together we started researching and testing high end art, UV filtering, optically coated glass. In a turn of good fortune, my extraordinarily knowledgeable glass consultant brought me his transparent, reflective/anti-reflective coated transmission glass to test. He and I dug deeper into using his company’s specialized, water-white, low iron, optical quality, reflection control glass, and incorporating GK’s substantial stable of frame designs to create the Ultimate Mirror TV.
And so in 2013, Reflectel Mirror TV was born. With Reflectel’s turnkey plug and play solutions, the fully customizable frame design has become the new benchmark in mirror TV applications.
For more on Reflectel Mirror TVs, visit www.reflectel.com .
February 2020 News
