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Wesley Lapointe

By his own account, Barnaby Wickham is not what anyone would describe as “zany” or “wacky” or any other adjective typically invoked to describe a colorful character.

“Annapolis Micro Systems Achieves AS9100D Certification” was the start of the less-than-lively headline on the news release he recently wrote for his defense electronics firm.

“I am not a kooky person,” said Wickham, 53, an assertion that would provoke no argument from his wife and two grown children — that is, until nearly a year ago when, apropos of nothing, he announced he would start collecting hubcaps during bike rides around Baltimore and bring them home.

His initial goal was to collect 40 by the end of 2024, a number he said he chose for no other reason than it was the number that popped into his mind. “It sort of came out of nowhere,” he said.

Wickham declared his aspiration to his wife, Kate, a high school guidance counselor whose job, as it happens, requires an abundance of patience. She nodded and smiled, and off Wickham went.

Baltimore, like any big city, has its fair share of litter, which meant that Wickham found his first hubcap on Jan. 3 and his 40th only nine weeks later. He wasn’t about to stop, an intention his wife said she could tolerate because he was neatly storing his finds in stacks in their garage turned hubcap orphanage.

“The silver lining,” Kate Wickham said, “is that he has to go collect hubcaps and I get an hour of quiet time.”

By then, Wickham was chronicling his findings on his blog and his Facebook page (“My first Tesla!” he wrote of one find on March 10). He created a scoreboard that tracked who, among his friends and family, had sent him the most tips on the locations of stray hubcaps. He appeared, at least according to his wife, to exhibit traces of pleasure telling her that their friend Sarah was leading her 12 to 10.

He also kept a handwritten log of where and when he picked up each hubcap, and their type. For example, he got his 58th hubcap, a Nissan model, on March 20 on Perring Parkway near Woodbourne Avenue — a find he recorded on a lined legal pad in red ink.

“This is my 100th,” Wickham announced on Facebook on April 21. “The Big Hubcap Project is growing bigger!”

“That’s a pretty one Barnaby!” a friend replied.

In August, after Wickham announced he had found “number 250!,” another friend wrote: “We can find you a support group for your obsession.”

As the year unfolded, his friends asked a range of questions, not the least of which was why he was gathering hubcaps and what he planned to do with his collection.

Wickham hadn’t thought too deeply about what was motivating him, beyond the fact that he found hubcaps to be somehow aesthetically pleasing. But, as he contemplated possible causes, he acknowledged that he had found himself with an abundance of free time in the few years since his son and daughter had left for college and felt “a little lost.”

“I wouldn’t say I went through a depression,” he said. “But it felt like depression. It was like a dull pain.”

Hubcaps became his muse, and the hunt for them helped give him a focus.

For a time, he wasn’t sure what he would do with them. He was inspired not by a humanitarian urge to clean up Baltimore, but by an impulse to build something. Kate Wickham suggested constructing a hubcap facsimile of a Christmas tree, as someone had done in the neighborhood of Hampden, a venerated center of Baltimore kookiness.

Wickham rejected the idea because it had been done. Then he had another notion, one that seemed even better after he searched Google Images and couldn’t find any evidence that anyone anywhere had attempted what he had in mind on so large a scale.

He would use his hubcaps to build a holiday wreath, the kind you hang on your front door, only his would be more than a dozen feet in diameter and would be made from the remnants of Toyotas, Hondas and whatever other wheel covers he found.

“I wanted to make something original,” he explained.

Enough literal trash has been turned into art over the years that the creations have become something of a genre. One artist made sculptures from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/2006/04/16/gum-artist-span-classbankheadjamie-marraccini-36-potomac-fallsspan/c3de19fa-1efc-4a51-ba0c-fcdf9a2fca13/" target=_blank>chewing gum</a>. A pair of American artists used <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/02/21/ghost-of-dream-museum-contemporary-art-arlington/" target=_blank>discarded lottery tickets</a> to build a representation of a luxury car.

In Pennsylvania, a gallery owner named Ken Marquis found himself at a car show more than a decade ago when he spotted a stray hubcap and had what he described as a “eureka moment.”

“I thought, ‘Gee, I think I could find artists to make something out of a hubcap,’” he said, describing how he then bought hundreds of the wheel coverings and invited artists across the country and overseas to turn them into art. “Artists have been doing this since the beginning of time, whether they’re using bark or shells or stones. Now it was hubcaps.”

What distinguishes Wickham in the realm of hubcap art is that he is not an artist — professional, amateur, starving or otherwise.

“I’m an office guy,” he said. “I sit at a cubicle.”

Before his fascination with hubcaps, Wickham had exhibited tendencies that suggested a penchant for scavenging. On occasion, he returned from bike rides with items he found along the way — discarded iPhones, broken eyeglasses, stray Baltimore Orioles caps, a wallet containing $72, a whistle and, somehow, several brassieres. (He turned the wallet and cash over to the police.)

Once he settled on hubcaps, Wickham drafted rules he also posted on Facebook dictating where and how he could pick them up. For example, he could only take hubcaps that were in their “natural habitat” (in the road, median or sidewalk), and they had to be collected while he was riding. No one could help transport his haul.

On Oct. 2, Wickham picked up his 300th hubcap, a Dodge model he logged in his minuscule handwriting. He decided that he had gathered enough to construct not one but two wreaths, and told his parents he planned to install one on the walnut tree outside their house in Baltimore County.

“We’re supportive of whatever he wants to do, no matter how crazy,’” said Jack Wickham, 88, Barnaby Wickham’s father. He added: “I just thought it was weird.”

Barnaby Wickham began building in early October. His father helped with the one on the walnut tree, which required strips of metal support, mesh and zip ties. The wreath is 17 feet wide and composed of 219 hubcaps.

The one on his own house is 12 feet wide and consists of 108 hubcaps.

As he stood with his wife in their front yard gazing at his creation the other day, Wickham said he was satisfied with how it had turned out. But he also felt how many artists feel when their work is done — a tad deflated.

He has agreed to remove the wreath from his father’s house sometime in January, a promise Jack Wickham said was a relief. “People can understand why it would be up for Christmas,” his father said. “But they will wonder what’s wrong with you if it’s April or July and it’s still up.”

On his block in north Baltimore, Barnaby Wickham said none of his neighbors have complained about the massive wreath hanging on the side of his house. He plans to take that one down in January, as well.

But he doesn’t think his urge to collect hubcaps will end there.

“I want to stay in the hubcap medium and build something new,” he said.

His wife’s smile suggested a mix of amusement and resignation.

“I don’t know what it’ll be, but it’ll be interesting,” she said. “You just kind of go with the flow.”

Oberlin College, BA in English

Paul Schwartzman specializes in political profiles and narratives about life, death and everything in between. Before joining The Washington Post, he worked at the New York Daily News, where he covered Rudolph W. Giuliani’s rise as mayor.

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