How ArtButMakeItSports became the 'best thing on the internet'

LJ Rader compares amazing sports photos to art that resembles them. The result is mind-blowing.

Author

Brad Wolverton
March 10, 2025

👋🏻 Welcome to Newsletter Examples, where I highlight cool sh*t I’m seeing in newsletters that you can borrow for your newsletter.

This week, I’m taking you inside ArtButMakeItSports, a one-of-a-kind newsletter that pushes the boundaries of visual storytelling. Reading time: 3 minutes.

Not a subscriber yet? Sign up here.

🎨 How it started

LJ Rader has always been a sports fan, and he’s spent his entire professional career working in sports.

He’s also an amateur art fan. He regularly visits museums and galleries, and has taken thousands of pictures of artwork he loves.

During the early days of Covid, he started creating sports captions for those pictures and posting them on social media.

He later started posting side-by-side images of famous sports pictures and art that resembled them, and his socials blew up.

🏅How it’s going

Now he focuses more on live games, feeding his “piece of culture” into the sports twitterverse, and watching it become a part of the conversation.

LJ started his newsletter in late 2023, as a “canvas to interact with & grow the incredible community that’s rallied behind ArtButMakeItSports,” he wrote in his debut issue.

Among his ideas for the newsletter:

  • Make custom sports/art comparisons for paying subscribers

  • Share more context on how he found (and why he chose) each piece of art

  • Explore the stories behind the sports photos

“The shot behind the shot,” one of his newsletter formats, features interviews with photographers on how they landed the picture, including this chat with University of Iowa’s Brian Ray, who took this iconic buzzer-beater by Caitlin Clark👇️…

LJ’s write-up of the artwork he selects provides another dimension:

“…when figuring out what to pair a sports image with, I spend time thinking through what makes it unique. In this case, it’s the perfect reflection on the court. There are a handful of artists who came to mind for the reflection—Peter Doig, Claude Monet—but I also knew I had photographed a piece by Winslow Homer from his 2022 exhibition at the Met.

A decent amount of his work incorporates bodies of water, and I knew with this particular painting there was a color palette that matched. Sure enough, after a handful of different position/cropping attempts, I managed to get the yellow and green of the jerseys, the size discrepancy of the players, the orange of the hoop, and most importantly, the reflection on the water.”

LJ Rader

📩 What’s next

The newsletter is not only a place where LJ explains his work, but a channel through which he calls out other “Art/Sports I’m Into” including “Artists of the Week” and “Sports Photographers You Need to Follow” like Elsa Garrison, who took this baller shot of LJ’s hometown New York Knicks:

While social media helped make him famous—he has 550k+ subscribers on X and 200k+ on Instagram—he has become increasingly disillusioned by the platforms. This year, he’s doubling down on his newsletter as a respite from what he calls a “social media reckoning”.

💥 Bonus Coverage

  • Want to go deeper on LJ’s story? I recommend this Q&A Madeline Hill did with him in her excellent newsletter, Impersonal Foul.

  • Wondering how LJ comes up with the art for all those amazing sports pics? Check out this incredible interview where he does on-the-fly comparisons on live TV👇️…

Hope you enjoyed this week’s examples. I’ll be back next week with another set!

☮️ -Brad

P.S. Thanks to reader Kendall Baker for recommending this edition. Kendall curates the best sports stories every day for Yahoo Sports AM, and calls ArtButMakeItSports “the best thing on the internet.”

P.P.S. My pal Dan Oshinsky just announced the finalists for the inaugural Inbox Awards, which has some amazing examples of innovative newsletters. Be sure to check out this post and vote!

P.P.P.S. I couldn’t figure out where to squeeze this in, but could not resist sharing one more LJ banger:

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