Junius Wilson’s dream was big. It was also heavy.

The 82-year-old Woodlawn artist, who has fought through depression, colon cancer and debilitating pain from a fall, finally got his big break Friday — a show at the American Visionary Art Museum. He’d wanted that ever since he began sculpting a decade ago and ultimately built a whimsical display evoking ancient Egypt in his backyard.

But when curators visited his suburban cul-de-sac earlier this year to choose the pieces they would display in “Fantastic Realities,” a show featuring the works of Wilson and other artists, they immediately realized that box trucks and platforms were inadequate for the task at hand.

Some of Wilson’s sculptures are 15 feet tall and weigh more than 800 pounds. Most had never lived anywhere except outside, in his yard, where they’d been subjected to wind, water, and critters that had made themselves at home in the nooks and crevices of his art.

Among the most challenging to move of the eight pieces displayed was Wilson’s minotaur sculpture, which comes with a hook to help move it — not that the apparatus is much help for an 800-pound delicate magenta carving.

“The first thing I asked is, ‘How much does it weigh?’” said Conner Dorbin, the museum’s registrar, who is tasked with getting artwork delivered and set up in the galleries. “Then, I needed to know, would it go through our front door? And if not, would it fit through the elevator? And if not, how will we get it up the stairs?”

Eventually, Dorbin and nine members of his team managed to nestle the minotaur into a nook on the second floor. Other pieces displayed include a giant tribute to the Ukrainian community that Wilson carved out of a tree in a Pikesville friend’s backyard.

Dorbin and his team also had to hire an exterminator to fumigate the pieces before placing them in their new home at the AVAM.

Wilson’s artist friends are no strangers to the difficulty of moving his immense pieces, which often include intricate chambers inside other chambers, where nothing is as it seems.

“The first time I met him, he put me to work,” said Anthony Coates, now 69, who helped Wilson move a 2-ton piece of wood for a giant pyramid that he built in the Woodlawn yard. Wilson hosts occasional pop-up shows in his yard where he dresses like a pharaoh and plays the flute in front of the structure.

“Fantastic Realities” opened Friday evening at the Federal Hill museum and will be on display for a year. The show includes an incarcerated craftsman who fashions sculptures out of found objects in his cell.

AVAM founder Rebecca Hoffberger has known Wilson for 50 years; he is close with one of her childhood friends, Michael Margolis. But she had never offered him the opportunity to exhibit his work until The Baltimore Banner featured it last year.

“Junius’ work is otherworldly,” said Ellen Owens, the museum’s director. “He’s making art in his backyard, and shooting it into the sky. He’s really channeling space and time.”

It’s a particularly satisfying turn of events for Wilson, who was not sure he would live to see this moment. Trained as an electrician, Wilson fell 30 feet off some scaffolding on a job 30 years ago while installing wires. He was in immense physical pain for years, and fell into a deep depression that only lifted a decade ago, when he began carving his sculptures after his doctor advised him to find a hobby.

His story is similar to so many of the artists that AVAM features — self-trained visionaries who use found objects to create art after suffering from trauma.

While most carvers place a picture over a piece of wood and trace it, Wilson works differently. He has visions. The picture springs from his mind. He sees the figure and begins to carve. It shifts with his imagination as he works, and the finished piece looks nothing like he initially envisioned.

“If you look at the artists we have canonized in our field, he’s obviously with them,” said exhibit curator Gage Branda.

Branda, an artist himself, understood Wilson’s elation at the show, but also his pain in parting with his artwork. So he built Wilson a totem pole to place in his yard, a connection between the two as artists and a promise that the museum would take good care of Wilson’s fantastic beasts.

“I hope it was a fair trade,” Branda said.

Wilson finished chemotherapy for colon cancer, but said small amounts of the disease remain in his body. Beaming as he pushed around a walker, Wilson took in the other artists’ work and chatted with curators and docents as his wife, Ilona, looked on. Friday night, Ilona stayed with the walker as Wilson, resplendent in his pharaoh garb, needed his hands free to hold his carved staff and shake hands with well-wishers.

“I need a knee replacement, I still have cancer. I have neuropathy from the chemo. And I am having the best time of my life,” he said. “It’s a wonderful thing to feel good knowing that you’re in a state of mind where you can meet people at my level and enjoy them.”