Baseball-card painter thr33som3s stages his own Senate races before Election Day

A pseudonymous Brooklyn painter who calls himself thr33som3s will have his collectors decide their own version of all 35 U.S. Senate races on November 2, the day before Election Day.

They will do it with his gouache paintings on vintage baseball cards. On his podcast last week, thr33som3s told collectors every team he painted, from cat moms to movie monsters, was a voting demographic all along.

"So you could have blue cat moms, really turning out the vote in Kentucky and Louisiana, and red submissives holding strong in the Midwest, or whatever, depending on how the collectors decide they want to do it," thr33som3s told Urgent Matter in a Sunday interview.

The election is the newest event in a five-year project. thr33som3s sells digital editions of his paintings as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, then turns the act of collecting his work into a game by writing rules that make collectors burn, or destroy, those tokens to win new work.

The candidates come from his 2024 presidential election event, when collectors invented their own politicians and wrote platforms and backstories for them. thr33som3s painted the candidates from that text afterward, and now they are running for the Senate.

The game opened Tuesday, when collectors had 24 hours to pick their races. Entering a candidate costs that candidate's NFT, which must be burned. Each candidate can run only once.

Players then get two days to send up to five of their demographic teams into any races, burning more cards for each placement. thr33som3s keeps all moves hidden.

Collectors vote November 2. Only after the vote does thr33som3s show where each demographic turned out, which decides whether a winning candidate comes out red or blue.

Players whose results match the real Senate races on November 3 earn more editions of the paintings the event produces. thr33som3s then paints every winning candidate again, in the state they won and in their new party's color.

"Maybe they don't want everybody to get those new paintings, maybe they want to … play it their own way," he said.

He said he has coached players to campaign against each other.

"Hey, caucus! Canvas. Figure out what everybody else is doing. Talk to them. Ask them. Lie to them," he said.

The election is the first thr33som3s event run entirely on his website, where collectors connect the crypto wallets holding their NFTs. Earlier events sent players across outside marketplaces, Discord and Google Forms. He said the setup will make the game easier for newcomers once he opens the site to the public.

Thousands of crypto wallets hold his work, he said, but active collectors never numbered more than 250. He expects a few dozen to play seriously this week.

Those collectors meet on Discord in a server called the Grotto, which he pictured as a 1970s cocktail lounge.

His two biggest collectors own at least one copy of about 95% of his editioned works, he said. One co-hosts his weekly podcast. Other players own a single copy of a single candidate and must decide whether to burn it.

Money helps, he said. Wealthy collectors have tried to buy everything, but "it hasn't necessarily worked out well for them" when they did not put time into strategy.

thr33som3s grew up in the mountains outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, on 640 acres backed by national forest land. His nearest neighbor was a 30-minute horseback ride away, he said.

Alone with his horses and dogs, he invented a dice baseball game in which every team was its nickname. On his website, the Detroit Tigers are cats, and the San Francisco Giants are giants.

He played baseball, then went into telecom. By his 40s, after three divorces and his father's death, he owned 400,000 baseball cards.

"And I was like, why on earth do I have baseball cards?" he said.

He started defacing them around 2019 with correction fluid and colored Sharpies, copying graffiti he had seen. A woman he was dating suggested gouache, a paint he had never heard of. He bought a $10 set at Hobby Lobby or Michael's.

"And all of a sudden, I could paint," he said.

He took a sabbatical from his corporate job the week after Beeple sold an NFT at Christie's for $69.3 million in March 2021. He priced out a custom website for the games he had in mind at $250,000, then moved the project onto the blockchain, where he said he could do it all for free.

He named the project, the persona and the paintings thr33som3s.

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"I just think it would be funny to make people say threesomes a lot," he said. "At the time, I liked having threesomes."

His early social media bio read "your ex-wife's favorite artist." He goes by Threes, and even makes dinner reservations under that name. He said he only uses his legal name to fly.

About four months after he left his job, he said, he won best non-digital artist at the NFT.NYC awards.

He sold his first NFT in 22 editions at $3 each. He said one later resold for as much as $18,000.

Most of his editions start at about a dollar or less. About once a year, he runs an open edition with no cap. Collectors stockpile cards they plan to burn later.

His largest single edition sold 175,000 copies, and two pieces together sold 235,000, he said.

"So, that's sort of my payday," he said.

Burned cards go to a wallet nobody holds the keys to. He compared it to the glass pane that seals away the villains in the first Superman movie.

About 2,900 of his paintings have been in play, and about 700 have been burned, he said. He added 387 new ones this year before the election.

He keeps the gouache originals in glassine at his studio, including the ones whose NFTs are gone.

Since Halloween 2021, when he released "Decorative Gourd Season Motherfuckers," four paintings of people holding gourds, he has staged three or four events a year. He hid clues from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in the NFT descriptions and told collectors the fourth figure was murdered.

For the Olympics two years ago, he painted all 206 competing countries and ran his own games the night before the real ones. This summer's World Cup event ran 35 days straight. England, which he said had gone to war with 30 of the 48 teams, had to pay reparations to play.

For the 2024 presidential race, he and his partner, an art writer, drove 10,000 miles over 33 days to 33 counties that were dead heats in the 2020 election. He painted three strangers a day.

The 99 portraits became the "Voters," each painted red, blue or purple based on his conversations with the subject. Collectors have used them to vote on choices he puts to them ever since.

He said he built in "a little class warfare."

"If the Reds win, anybody who voted with red gets to keep all of the blues that got voted," he said. "If the Blues win… all of them get destroyed."

Blue can still beat red, he said, but only if blue voters agree to sacrifice their cards collectively.

Six months after the 2024 election, 24 voters were called for jury duty. Collectors burned them for new portraits of the same people as jurors, who will hear the case against the character accused of the Halloween 2021 murder.

The defendant, whom thr33som3s described as "a brown person," was indicted by a collector grand jury and has been "waiting for his trial for years now," he said. He said the trial will happen in the next couple of months.

The blockchain also lets him spot cheating. In the early days, he said, some collectors ran multiple wallets to game his events, with one person acting as 30 different people.

He said he cuts those players out of new drops and disavows the editions they hold, even after they transfer them to another wallet.

Most people who bought his first two weeks of work sold it all by the third week, he said.

"My work is not worth what it was at its peak," he said.

"I've lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in supporting other NFT projects that have vaporized and don't exist," he said.

"Anytime anybody ever says NFTs are a scam, they're fucking right," he said, adding that he did not know that NFTs were any less of a scam than the rest of the art world.

He also said NFT trading involves "just as much money laundering as fine art auctions."

"I'm the greatest living NFT artist," he said, then added that he was the only one.

At gallery dinners, he said, the reaction to his work is "utter and abject, immediate dismissal just when the letters NFT are said."

People who get past it tend to get hung up on the gameplay and call it "a cute game," he said.

Asked to make the case for the project as art, he said it is painting, conceptual art and performance art at once.

"It cannot exist without that blockchain element," he said.

He said he expects to need more than 30,000 paintings to finish the universe, putting him about 10% of the way there.

"Ideally, I just got hit by a bus or something that ended it for me," he said.

If that happens, he said, another artist could give his tokens new uses, because anyone can reference anything on the blockchain. He has already done the same with other artists' NFTs.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article named thr33som3s' partner. Her name has been removed at his request.

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