Rashaad Newsome pulls from art history, advertising, and Black queer culture to produce counterhegemonic works that balance social practice, abstraction, and intersectionality. Newsome’s

work is multifaceted, but collage remains a core method by which the artist constructs a new cultural and political framework. Presented in a luxurious nineteenth-century Dutch style frame, Thirst Trap combines photographs of West African masks, totems, and sculptures with male nudes in poses that evoke voguing, a dance subculture crafted by Black and Brown queer people. In doing so, Newsome reframes the modes of modernist appropriation of African art and aesthetics.