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Jim Zivic

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Design for Living

It’s all about finding things that are beautiful but also functional and purposeful. Invoking the knowledge of the past and applying the technology of the future, Forbes celebrates today’s artists and designers that provide both form and function—and the extraordinary products whose designs are at the heart of everything they do.

By Jane Smith

STYLE & DESIGN

Zivic discovers elegant proportion in numerous materials far afield from the conventional resources of art—this is a man who compares welding half-inch steel rods to gestural drawing—or for that matter, from fine furniture design. experimentation.

A Designer finds poetry in steel & Coal “I have a personal desire to save America from itself,” declares Jim Zivic, 50, an artist and furniture maker whose work is rooted in the kind of sooty, just-clinging-on postindustrial landscape inhabited by Born in the USA–era Bruce Springsteen characters. For a savior he is a pretty droll guy, though, with a well-ripened sense of just how peculiar it is to, say, hone lumps of coal into $30,000 end tables and have them taken up by rock stars, plutocrats, and Leisure Class Heroes like Tom Ford. On the other hand, they are very beautiful tables: one-off, gemlike, even mysterious.

Zivic’s famous coal pieces spring from something like Michelangelo’s impulse to take a slab of marble and chip away everything that doesn’t look like the David. Except that Zivic discovers elegant proportion in numerous materials far afield from the conventional resources of art—this is a man who compares welding half-inch steel rods to gestural drawing—or for that matter, from fine furniture design. Thomas Chippendale may have perused the commodity indexes also, but he wasn’t moved to scour the country for brokers of smoked rubber, or perfect, unblemished bales of organic cotton, or multiton chunks of anthracite. Zivic’s work demands that we resee what is right in front of our faces and, where appropriate, sit on it.

The man is partly joking about saving America, of course—he knows the kind of shade-tree industries he reveres may be too far gone; he gets that he is an all-but-invisible player in an epic drama—but he is in earnest, too. “Everybody wants ‘local’ food,” Zivic muses, “but few people consider locally sourcing the objects they surround themselves with. What if every American just bought one piece of American-made furniture?” He is the locavore as patriot.

Zivic, who works out of a converted chicken coop in deeply rural Jefferson, New York, is an accomplished draftsman, fine art painter, welder, sculptor, and perforce coal polisher.