José Zanine Caldas
José Zanine Caldas was born in Belmonte (Bahia) in 1919. He was a self-taught professional, model maker, designer, sculptor and architect. At age twenty, Zanine moved from his hometown to Rio de Janeiro where he met and worked with Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa. Zanine moved to Sao Paulo and expanded his resumé working as a scale modeler, furniture producer, landscape designer and modeling teacher at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism.

In the 1950s Zanine traveled back to his hometown and became inspired by the local craftsmen who carved canoes and rowboats from felled trees. He gained a reputation as the “wood magician” because of his extraordinary skill at shaping wood. Many of his pieces were built with joints and could be easily disassembled. Persecuted by the military regime in 1964 and banished from the university by the government, he lived in the State of Bahia where he produced several pieces of sculpted furniture from the residues of the devastation of forests.