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Stephon Castle says impressive plays from Spurs teammate Victor Wembanyama happens “often”
Spurs Stephon Castle explains to Lorenzo Reyes what its like playing in the NBA with a unicorn like Victor Wembanyama.
- LJ Rader is the creator of the popular social media account “Art But Make It Sports,” which pairs viral sports photos with fine art.
- The account gained significant attention after the NFL requested a pairing for a shirtless Jason Kelce photo, causing Rader’s phone to overheat from notifications.
- Rader, a former Emmy-winning NBC Sports producer, manually curates the pairings from a personal collection of over 15,000 art images.
- The account has over a million followers across various platforms, including fans like Caitlin Clark and Ben Stiller.
You’ve heard about phones blowing up. Well, LJ Rader’s actually did once.
He got so many mentions and DMs and new followers that his phone overheated and stopped working. (To be fair, it was already low on battery. But still.)
This is what happens when the NFL asks you, the genius behind the Art But Make It Sports meme account, to do something with a photo of a shirtless Jason Kelce leaning out a stadium window with a beer in his hand, and you respond with Phillips de Koninck’s “The Feast of Bacchus.”
Your phone, and your account that pairs photos of viral sports moments with images of fine art, blows up.
“You’re taught you have to pick one. You have to be an athlete or an artist, you can’t do both. I’ve kind of shown people that you can like both art and sport,” Rader said during a talk last week at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Art But Make It Sports’ Wemby pairing goes viral
An Art But Make It Sports meme is going viral again after Victor Wembanyama’s monster performance that gave the San Antonio Spurs the double-OT win over the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals. Rader’s pairing of a photo of Wemby in front of his delirious teammates with Henry Ossawa Tanner’s “Angels Appearing Before the Shepherds” has about 40,000 likes and 3,500 shares less than 12 hours after the game’s conclusion.
“Literal perfection with this one friends,” one of the comments on Instagram said.
Art But Make It Sports has become a favorite of fans of both art and sports, with more than 1 million followers on X, Instagram, Threads and Bluesky. Caitlin Clark and Ben Stiller follow the account, as do most leagues and teams and several art museums.
It’s quite a change from the account’s early days, when Rader was posting “into the abyss.”
Rader has spent his career in sports. He worked at NBC Sports – he won an Emmy as a producer for the network’s Olympics coverage – and eventually got into the business side of sports data. But he’s been an art fan since he was a kid, when his grandparents would take him to museums and galleries.
They also had friends who were yet-to-be discovered artists, including abstract painter Michael Goldberg.
Rader considered minoring in art history at Vanderbilt, but his parents didn’t love the idea. Instead, when he traveled the world on work and personal trips, Rader would visit museums and take photos of the paintings and sculptures he saw. One of his folders now has more than 15,000 images of artwork.
LJ Rader started with art imitating sport, then flipped it on its head
In 2019, Rader started posting images of the artwork with sports-related captions. “Let me tell you about my fantasy team,” was his caption of Berthold Woltze’s The Irritating Gentleman. By mid-2020, he realized he could pair the artwork with photos of actual sporting events.
“I had friends reach out and say, ‘You should turn this into a thing,'” Rader said.
Art But Make It Sports gradually picked up followers. When Sarah Spain, then predominantly with ESPN, mentioned the account, it took off. Now fans, photographers, teams and leagues will tag Rader when there’s a photo they think is a good candidate for Art But Make It Sports.
Not everything makes it, of course. Rader doesn’t post photos of injuries. The photo has to be funny, like the Kelce one. Or evoke emotion, like one of Bad Bunny’s halftime show at the Super Bowl that was paired with The Sermon on the Mount by Beryl Lewis.
And, of course, Rader has to have artwork to go with it.
Contrary to what many assume, Rader doesn’t use AI or a computer program. The memes are all him.
Though Rader occasionally will pull from a museum’s archive, almost all of the artwork he uses is from the collection of images he’s taken over the years. After he takes the images, he studies them, “cataloging” them in his mind. So when he sees a photo from a sporting event, he can recall a specific work of art in his collection, a theme in art or, his favorite, the style of a particular artist.
“That then tests my knowledge of art history,” he said. “That tends to be the most gratifying, the most exciting.”
Though Rader is partial to abstract art, he also loves tavern scenes and the Dutch golden age. Basketball is very meme-friendly while football, soccer and tennis are less so. He’d love to feature more women’s sports, the PWHL in particular, but there aren’t as many photos available.
“Anyone out there, if you’re a women’s sports fan, feed me images,” Rader said.
While the Kece meme might be the most famous one Rader has done — the NFL is king, after all — his favorite is one he calls “The Blue Dunk,” a Walter Iooss photo of Michael Jordan dunking on a blue court that is paired with Clyfford Still’s PH-923.
People have asked why Rader doesn’t try and monetize Art But Make It Sports; he released a coffee table book earlier this year, but that’s it. Aside from already having a day job — he just co-founded FanFlare Sports, a hybrid social media and sports data platform for women’s volleyball — Rader does Art But Make It Sports because he loves art and sports, and gets joy when other people do, too.
“If I made it my full-time job, I think that will make it feel like work,” Rader said. “… At the end of the day, I still kind of think these are my dumb musings.”
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.
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