Art, but Make It Sports

Back in October, a couple of days after the Wolves beat the Portland Trail Blazers 118-114 on opening night, FBI agents swooped in to arrest Blazers head coach (and former Wolves point guard) Chauncey Billups for allegedly participating in a nefarious mafia-run scheme to rig illegal poker games. Immediately after Billups’s arrest, everybody’s favorite viral high-meets-low-culture meme account, @artbutmakeitsports, posted a photo of Billups from his playing days juxtaposed with a painting from the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s collection, Dutch master Hendrick Ter Brugghen’s 1623 painting, The Gamblers. It was the perfect @artbutmakeitsports post—a smidge of art history together with a little pop culture commentary, wittily rolled into a tweet.

LJ Rader, the thirtysomething New Yorker behind the account, is familiar with Mia’s collection because he has a Minnesota connection. “I work for Sportradar, a sports data and content company that has its global headquarters in Minneapolis,” he says during our interview in advance of this Sunday’s upcoming Art But Make It Sports book launch gallery tour at Mia. “I work out of our New York office, but I’ve visited Minneapolis over 15 times in the last eight years.”

As an analyst with Sportradar, it’s his job to assist major sports leagues with data and content. “We have all this historic data and we help our partners find it,” he says. “We do data collection, statistical data, and then we build research tools, graphics integrations, all this stuff. You’re watching a Twins game, and you’ll learn, Byron Buxton just became the first player in Twins history to hit three home runs in the first six innings. That’s us.”

So Rader is more of a sports junkie than a fine art junkie, but with his social media accounts and new book, he’s established himself as a unique intersectional expert. He’s only taken one art history course at Vanderbilt, but his platform is based on an almost mutant-like talent—when he launched @artbutmakeitsports on Twitter and Instagram in 2019, he discovered he has an incredible memory for fine art images. When he sees a sports photograph, he can recall, off the top of his head, a pose, or a style, or even just a figure or a form, from a painting or a sculpture. And then he posts and just lets the two images comment on each other. So when Anthony Edwards is taunting the Lakers’ Luka Doncic, he’ll make a special Easter Sunday post of that photograph next to Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus, or when the Vikings sack Aaron Rodgers and toss him around like a rag doll, Rader will post that photograph next to Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa.