When artist Vivian Chavez first began shaping what would become The Love I Have to Give Before I Die, her debut solo exhibition, she knew who she wanted by her side. “I don’t think I would have approached this work feeling as safe, supported, or seen without Paula,” Chavez said of her longtime collaborator and friend, curator Paula Cuevas.
On view Aug. 7–Sept. 4 at the Swan Coach House Gallery, the exhibition is the tangible result of Chavez and Cuevas’s decade-long creative relationship, one that has evolved through production sets, multidisciplinary collaborations, and now, a fine art gallery.
Chavez, an Atlanta-born, Mexican-American artist, has spent the past 15 years moving fluidly across disciplines: production design, large-scale sculpture, murals, and installation. The Love I Have to Give Before I Die is her most personal body of work to date.
“To bring this to life—in the city I was born and raised in, with this community, and the people I love—it’s surreal, terrifying, and incredibly meaningful all at once. … And it’s also just the beginning.”
artist Vivian Chavez
Composed of salvaged metal, soft fabrics, black plastic, plaster, and mesh, Chavez’s sculptures are intimate constructions, reflections of grief and memory built by hand. Many are made using techniques passed down from her late father, Carlos Jorge Chavez, to whom The Love I Have to Give Before I Die is dedicated.
The show is also the product of trust. Cuevas, a Savannah College of Art and Design graduate with a background in interior and set design, approached the curation less as a directive and more as a dialogue. “This project was a chance to prove to myself that I’m capable of existing in the fine art realm,” Cuevas said. “But more than that, it was about honoring the process we’d already built together.”
Traditionally, curators are often cast as architects of context, responsible for framing an artist’s work within institutional or academic frameworks. Cuevas rejects that mold. Her curatorial style was more about “making space for Vivian’s work to lead.”
That approach informed each decision in The Love I Have to Give Before I Die: how a steel frame bends into the light, how a soft shape drapes and folds into shadow, how a fragile tether interrupts an open path. “We tested things constantly,” says Cuevas. “Some ideas stuck, and some didn’t. But what mattered most was that Vivian felt safe and excited to try something a little scary.”
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For both women, The Love I Have to Give Before I Die marks a debut, but not a beginning. For Cuevas, whose set design credits include campaigns for Serta, Marie Claire, and Entertainment Weekly, the project affirmed her desire to keep pushing past commercial work into spaces that feel more experimental, more human. She hopes the exhibition encourages other creatives “to trust their voice, trust their weird ideas, and trust the people who see them.”
And for Chavez, the show is a homecoming. “To bring this to life—in the city I was born and raised in, with this community, and the people I love—it’s surreal, terrifying, and incredibly meaningful all at once,” she says. “It feels like a culmination of so many years of grief, hope, and love. And it’s also just the beginning.”