Even artists who make sculptures out of toothpicks and glue are part of an artistic tradition. One of the great things about living in Baltimore, home of the American Visionary Art Museum, is that we get a chance to trace such traditions as few others can.

The highlight of AVAM’s new year-long exhibit, All Things Round: Galaxies, Eyeballs and Karma, is Scott Weaver’s “Rolling Through the Bay,” a 9-by-7-by-3-foot sculpture of San Francisco assembled from 104,588 toothpicks and gallons of Elmer’s Glue over the course of 37 years.

For Weaver, a produce manager for a Lucky Supermarket in Sonoma County, Calif., the payoff for hauling his sculpture 3,000 miles in a truck is not just the thrill of being in a museum show but also the epiphany that he’s not the only toothpick sculptor out there. The AVAM permanent collection includes not only “Lusitania,” Chicagoan Wayne Kusy’s 16-foot-long model of the eponymous ocean liner constructed from 194,000 toothpicks, but also the world’s largest collection of Baltimorean Gerald Hawkes’ matchstick sculptures. And Stan Munro, the creator of Toothpick City in Syracuse, N.Y., was planning to attend Friday’s opening of the AVAM exhibit just so he could meet Weaver.

“When I started, I didn’t know anyone else was doing this,” Weaver marveled during the media opening for the AVAM show on Oct. 5. “We all think that when we start out. But to see something like the ‘Lusitania’ is heartening. It’s great to know that there are other toothpick artists out there, to know that I’m not just working alone in a closet. I wonder if it’s as therapeutic for them as it has been for me; it was definitely therapeutic for me after my father left the family. . . . Even though we each have our own techniques, we can all appreciate the endless hours, often tedious hours, this work requires. It often takes me five days just to make the window for a house. But it’s worth it, because people are always astounded that something so small could turn into something so large.”

Weaver wasn’t the only artist to make unexpected connections when he came to AVAM for the new show. Wendy Brackman, who cut up paper plates to construct the 8-foot-diameter mandala that serves as the show’s signature image, was astonished to find the paper plates of Baltimore’s Christine McCormick in the museum’s permanent collection. McCormick’s pointillist paintings on the plates are very different from Brackman’s architectural assemblages, but the younger artist felt an instant kinship with her predecessor. “Oh, wow,” she exclaimed, “that’s so amazing. I would never have thought to do that.”

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