For the past decade, Jim Zivic’s métier has been coal, which he sculpts, hones, and polishes into massive tables for clients like Lou Reed and Salma Hayek. “It’s a little romance with the muck,” he says of the anthracite chunks, which he buys 14 tons at a time from a mine in Pennsylvania and stores in the backyard of his upstate New York home. The coal’s earthiness and anti-preciousness appeal to Zivic, but the irony of his situation doesn’t escape him. “The same stuff my neighbors are burning for heat, Ralph [Pucci, his agent] is selling for thousands of dollars” a piece, he says. His latest coal tables show him experimenting with the material’s texture and physical properties. Some of the chunks he has coated in silicone, playing up the anthracite’s natural luster; others he has left in their rough state, when they’ve just exited the earth. He’s poured molten metal into the cracks of a few, mimicking the butterfly joints and barbell-shaped repairs common in woodworking, and dumped plain epoxy in the deep cuts of others, to keep the fragile matter from falling apart. “They’re all in different stages of finish,” he says of the works, “because I want to show people there is beauty in roughness, too.” The pieces, along with his other new commodities-based furniture, including benches made of cotton bales, aluminum dining tables, and upholstered steel-framed chaises formed from hexagonal bars—are on view at Pucci’s Gallery Nine New York showroom through April.