The Collection

Chaz Guest is an American painter and sculptor whose figurative work explores Black identity, cultural memory, and the enduring presence of the African American experience. Raised in Philadelphia after his family relocated when he was ten, Guest studied kinesiology and graphic design at Southern Connecticut State University before pursuing fashion illustration in New York and, later, Paris. It was there, while working as an illustrator for Joyce Paris magazine, that a pivotal encounter with designer Christian Lacroix redirected his career toward painting. Largely self-taught as a painter, Guest developed his practice through intensive study of museum collections, drawing on the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, and Japanese aesthetics in equal measure. Each work begins with gestural Sumi ink marks — calligraphic and improvisational — before building through pigment washes and oil on raw linen, a layered process he compares to jazz composition.

His portraits and historical tableaux resist narrative closure, presenting Black subjects with quiet authority and psychological depth. He is perhaps best known for his ongoing Buffalo Soldiers series, depicting the all-Black US Army regiments who served on the Western frontier after the Civil War, and for a portrait of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall that hung in President Barack Obama's Oval Office. His collectors have included Oprah Winfrey and Angelina Jolie, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, Flaunt, and the World of Interiors, among others.

Guest has exhibited at Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; RX & SLAG Gallery, Paris; and London's National Portrait Gallery. His work was included in the Armory Show, New York (2025). He lives and works in Los Angeles.