PIX11

‘A painful beauty’: Michael K. Williams featured in Manhattan art exhibit

SOHO, Manhattan (PIX11) — The late actor Michael K. Williams had a sad, haunting beauty that is captured in a new and unusual art exhibit called Memories of Warriors at the Vito Schnabel Gallery.

Painter Chaz Guest used the actor as a model for his series on Buffalo soldiers two weeks before the actor died from an overdose. Now, eight haunting paintings hang in a SoHo gallery.

Originally, the actor, who shot to fame as Omar in “The Wire,” approached Guest because he wanted a part in his upcoming film about a young Black superhero. The movie is based on Guest’s graphic novel “Buffalo Warrior.”

“It’s sort of a painful beauty and, with the scar, a warrior aspect as well,” Guest told PIX11 News. “I didn’t know he was battling with drugs.”

Guest, a former New Yorker who now lives in Los Angeles, wanted to focus on Black superheroes and the Buffalo Soldiers of the late 1800s to give his sons idols to admire who looked like them.

“The Buffalo Soldiers tell the story of individuals after slavery, after being enslaved, searching for a place in civilization after the horrific holocaust of slavery,” Guest said.

The gallery is a homecoming for Guest, who taught himself to paint in SoHo in the 1980s.

All eight of his paintings have sold for between $65,000 and $120,000. But it’s the message of these paintings, not the price, he wants to celebrate.

“I want to bring people together for our likeness as human beings not because of our differences,” Guest told PIX11 News.

Memories of Warriors will be on view at the Vito Schnabel Gallery through March 19.