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Helen Miranda Wilson

    SALVATION

    Condemned Wellfleet House Gets a Reprieve

    Helen Wilson buys Peace Valley house to save it from receivership

    By

    WELLFLEET — Helen Miranda Wilson says she has been staring at the house at 177 Peace Valley Road her whole life. And what she’s seen there has not always been pretty.

    Despite being in a program meant to get owners to repair derelict houses, this one at 177 Peace Valley Road in Wellfleet stood open to the elements again this winter. It appeared headed for receivership but has now been bought. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

    The house, which abuts her own, was condemned by the town’s health dept. in 2018 for health and safety violations. And despite the town’s pursuit of help from the state attorney general’s office to get absentee owner Robert Bonds to take steps to save it, the place continued on a path to ruin. Until last week.

    Wilson, an artist and former member of the Wellfleet Select Board, has purchased the formerly grand 19th-century house for $900,000. The transaction was recorded at the Barnstable County Registry of Deeds on May 22.

    The sale was “as is,” meaning that restoration of the house, and its costs, now falls on Wilson’s shoulders. The $900,000 went to Bonds, the seller.

    A History of Neglect

    Boston businessman Robert Bonds bought the 3.7-acre property in 1983 for $65,000. He rented the place out rather than living there. Gradually, it fell into disrepair, with broken windows and holes in the roof that have left the interior filled with rotting walls and unsafe floors.

    Wilson had seen owners of the house come and go. “Growing up, I was in and out of that house for years,” she said. Under Bonds’s ownership, groups of young people often rented the large house for the summer. Parties would keep Wilson and her late partner, Tim Woodman, awake until the early morning hours. As Wilson colorfully described it in an earlier report, “It was like living near a biker bar, with people puking in the bushes.”

    The house became a source of complaints from neighbors and the town’s regulatory agents as far back as 2001. The building is now uninhabitable.

    Condemning the house in 2018 failed to get Bonds to make repairs; that’s when local officials looked to the state for help. The attorney general’s Neighborhood Renewal Division oversees a program under which the state works with property owners to bring houses with severe code violations back into compliance. The attorney general’s office accepted the property into the program in 2023.

    No Results From AG Action

    Also failing to get results from the owner, the attorney general’s office began the process in Southeast Housing Court of putting the house in receivership in May 2024. Bonds avoided that outcome by signing an agreement in court on July 31, 2024 saying the repair work would be done in 270 days, making his deadline this May.

    The grounds were cleared of brush, and some interior demolition was done late last summer. Then the work stalled. The Housing Court judge warned Bonds at a hearing in December that restoration work needed to show considerable progress by the next hearing in mid-May.

    Bonds’s contractor, Adrian Moylette, had applied for a building permit in late November, but Building Commissioner Victor Staley told him detailed plans must first be submitted. Those didn’t arrive until late February.

    Staley also told Bonds that the demolition portion of the project would require review by the historical commission under the town’s demolition delay bylaw, because the house was more than 75 years old.

    David Freed, a Quincy architect hired by Bonds, discussed a proposed renovation plan for the house during an April 2 historical commission hearing. Freed said no demolition was planned because the house was structurally sound. Freed had not been inside the house, but he said someone from his office had done three-dimensional imaging that showed the structure was still solid.

    Commission co-chair Merrill Mead-Fox expressed some doubt about that conclusion, pointing out that the house had been open to the elements for several years. But because Bonds’s architect said no demolition would take place, no action could be taken by the historical commission.

    Options and Trees

    Wilson started negotiating with Bonds for purchase of the property about six weeks ago, according to attorney Bruce Bierhans, who represents Wilson. By the time of the May 21 status hearing in Southeast Housing Court, all that was needed was for the judge to approve the sale, which he did. The sale was recorded at the Registry of Deeds the next day.

    For now, Wilson will take Bond’s place as the defendant in the court case. The judge set a date of Aug. 12 to check on her progress.

    Bierhans said that although Wilson has been given the information and conceptual plans that Bonds put together, she will do her own evaluation.

    “We’re going to assemble a team that will work together to see what the best options for the property are and make this a piece of property that the town is going to be proud of,” Bierhans said.

    Wilson has a keen interest in the grounds and its four grand old trees. The ancient American chestnut and Dutch elm qualify as “lingering” trees, having survived diseases that destroyed most others of their kind. “The elm was seeded from the six Dutch elms on my property,” Wilson said. Her own elm trees died of Dutch elm disease. The American chestnut tree is also a survivor of a fungal disease that destroyed many of those trees in the early 20th century. An immense apple tree two stories high still produces edible fruit, said Wilson. A black walnut tree, a good shade provider, also grows there.

    “Those trees are, in some ways, as important to me as the house,” Wilson said. It’s been more than a decade since she was inside, but she remembered “the house is pretty wonderful in terms of space.”

    According to a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, the Peace Valley Road property is the only one in the four Outer Cape towns enrolled in the Neighborhood Renewal Division. Statewide, the program has gotten more than 2,200 referrals on derelict properties from 140 cities and towns. Communities can refer up to 10 properties for inspection by an assistant attorney general. Code violations on most of the properties are resolved without resorting to receivership.

    But that kind of resolution did not appear to be in the offing for this house. Had Wilson not stepped in before the May 21 hearing, the court would likely have determined the house’s fate, selecting a receiver to take it over and placing a lien on the property to pay for repairs. The receiver would then have been able to sell the house to collect those funds.

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on May 29, incorrectly identified one of the “lingering” trees at 177 Peace Valley Road as a horse chestnut. It is an American chestnut, the variety that was destroyed by a fungal disease in the last century.

    IN THE STUDIO

    The Ebb and Flow of a Life in Art

    Helen Miranda Wilson’s journey of ‘digression and precision’

    By

    Helen Miranda Wilson’s studio sits at the center of her Wellfleet house, which was built in the 1850s. The studio seems set up for ideas to unravel and find form: its off-white floorboards have been freshly painted; a skylight and oversized window let in natural light; a lemon tree and basil plant grow in terra-cotta pots on the floor.

    Helen Miranda Wilson at Cape Cod Bay. (Detail from a photo by Cindy Kleine)

    The installation-like mix of references and artwork on the walls of Wilson’s studio provides a look into the way her ideas germinate and develop. At present, the color blue dominates the walls. Two oil-on-panel paintings of simple forms are rendered with thick white lines against blue backgrounds — one robin-egg, the other closer to teal. “The more you leave out of a painting, the more responsibility whatever is in the painting has,” says Wilson.

    In Guidon, a flame-like form reaches upward. It’s disarmingly simple and painted with conviction: an attentiveness to the edges of the form, subtly blurred; the confines of the rectangle; and the surface, which has the same soft matte finish as her other oil paintings (she achieves this by painting with no medium). Another image of two downward sloping lines looks familiar, like it could be a corporate logo, but the focus with which it’s rendered elevates it to something that approaches the devotional.

    Guidon by Helen Miranda Wilson.

    Among these finished paintings are unfinished works; small gouache paintings on paper; sketches; family photographs; an advertisement with a model in a ruffled dress; and the packaging from earphones. Wilson’s criteria for what will go on the wall: “I just want to look at it, so I stick it up.”

    Wilson’s creative output is marked by both digression and precision. Before making abstract paintings, she was committed to painting representationally. On the wall is one of these earlier works: an image of a feather. The fuzz of the feather’s aftershaft is rendered with breathtaking detail, like an articulate whisper.

    Feather by Helen Miranda Wilson.

    Wilson also painted people. In her foyer is a 1980 painting of two young women putting on clothes from a trunk of costumes: it captures a memory of Wilson with Francesca Woodman, a photographer who became well known after her death at age 22. She was the cousin of Wilson’s late partner, sculptor Timothy Woodman. In a sitting area across from Wilson’s studio hangs her close-up portrait of Christopher Walling, a jewelry designer whom she knew growing up in Wellfleet.

    Francesca’s Box by Helen Miranda Wilson.

    Wilson was raised in the house where she now lives. Wellfleet was a place where she encountered “a whole milieu of people who thought out of the envelope,” she says. “People who made things to look at, to read, or to listen to.” Her father, Edmund Wilson, was a fearsome, famous literary critic, and her mother, Elena Wilson, was an editor who had studied art in Munich and Paris.

    Throughout the house, Wilson has sparsely installed paintings and sculptures of other local artists, some historical and others among her contemporaries. There are a pair of Pat de Groot paintings, and on an upstairs mantel are a set of ceramic animal sculptures by Provincetown artist Polly Burnell. By her bedside is a small Louisa Matthíasdóttir painting given to her as a present by Woodman.

    Wilson had her first exhibition at Cherry Stone Gallery in Wellfleet in 1971 — it was the gallery’s first show. She lived in New York City for many years afterward and where she exhibited and sold her paintings. “I painted almost every day for 41 years,” says Wilson. “I did it all out of appetite and a certain amount of discipline when organizing for a show. There was no obsession and no grind.”

    For much of her career, she made landscape paintings, but even in this format she was digressive, ranging widely in her subjects. In Wellfleet, where she spent summers until moving here for good in 1999, Wilson painted the town’s transfer station, its night skies, and bare trees in fall. In New York, she painted industrial sites and views from the top of the World Trade Center.

    At the Transfer Station by Helen Miranda Wilson.

    “I painted landscapes from direct observation wherever I found myself,” says Wilson. “I never used photos. Painting outdoors is all about surrender and being completely there, in the moment. You can’t control it.” She never took shortcuts in her landscape paintings. Her finely attuned attention, concern with detail, and holistic vision reveal a posture of full surrender to her subjects.

    When Wilson returned to live in Wellfleet, she became involved in town government, where she served on several committees including the select board. The experience drove Wilson toward abstraction in her studio.

    “The town stuff was so much reality,” says Wilson. “I stopped wanting to work from life.”

    Faith by Helen Miranda Wilson. This painting depicts an 1848 map of the section of Wellfleet where Wilson lives.

    A few of her early abstract pictures hang in her studio, including a grid of tiny colored squares and a gouache painting of undulating lines in shades of earthy green. An agenda from a Herring River Restoration Committee meeting is also tacked to her studio wall. In the margins of the photocopy, she created thumbnail sketches of organic, pod-like forms.

    Some of her more recent abstractions have associations with reality, like a series composed of long lines on yellow grounds that she relates to telegrams. There’s a bluejay’s feather and some accompanying works on paper that lift their colors and lines from it. Despite her variation, a sensibility ties the work together — it has something to do with the diminutive scale, her confidence, and her meticulous touch.

    Haida by Helen Miranda Wilson.

    “I want to make more of those yellow paintings,” says Wilson, gesturing toward the telegram pictures. “But I don’t get to it. The way my life is now, there aren’t enough hours in the day.” Despite all the generative energy in Wilson’s studio, she isn’t painting much these days, and most of the work on display was done before 2018, the year Woodman died.

    Wilson’s Wellfleet studio. (Photos courtesy Helen Miranda Wilson)

    “I felt lost after Tim’s death,” says Wilson. “That same year, I developed cataracts to the point where I couldn’t draw or paint. I haven’t gone back to the studio in a regular way since then.”

    Wilson and Woodman had been together since they met at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1970. A painting of Duck Pond in the entranceway of the house is one of Wilson’s earliest — it commemorates a conversation the two had there, agreeing to an equal partnership.

    Wilson isn’t sure when she’ll pick up an active studio practice again. Her paintings were never done with pretense or artifice. Despite successes, she never stuck with a particular subject if she wasn’t feeling compelled. She likens her current absence from the studio to a lack of appetite, not a creative block — and she’s fine with it. “I’ve learned not to hate myself for the stuff I’m not able to do any more,” she says.

    And yet, the studio isn’t packed away. Some paintings in the space remain partially completed. Like unfinished sentences, they bristle with suggestion, their resolutions uncertain. Thinking about her future, Wilson recalls a line of Grace Paley’s poetry about “the open destiny of life,” which hangs in her kitchen.

    “I’m moving forward,” says Wilson, “but I’m not sure where I’m going.”

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on Jan. 9, incorrectly reported that Elena Wilson, Helen’s mother, had studied art in Provincetown. She studied in Europe with Provincetown artist and teacher Hans Hofmann.

    ‘Night and Day’ at Albert Merola Gallery

    By

    Opening Friday, July 2nd and running through July 28th at Albert Merola Gallery is “Night and Day,” a group show with works spanning mediums, generations, and geography.

    Paintings by celebrated local artists Helen Miranda Wilson and the late Pat de Groot will hang alongside photographs by David Armstrong, Lyle Ashton Harris, Matías Alvial, and, notably, Peter Hujar, who will have his own show-within-a-show in the back room of the gallery.

    Hujar, who died of AIDS in 1987, is one of the most admired American photographers. An artist who did little to promote or commercialize his art, he produced a large body of work that documents the bohemian world of ’70s and ’80s New York City. Among the eight Hujar photographs in this smaller show are Dog in Provincetown Street and David Wojnarowicz Manhattan Night (II), a quiet portrait of the famed writer, artist, AIDS activist, and lover of Hujar. The photo, left is © Peter Hujar Archive LLC.

    In the larger show, visitors may also be drawn to the single photogravure print by Vija Celmins, Night Sky 2 (Reversed), a negative skyscape that resembles the sand of a Cape Cod beach. —Will Powers

     

    WELLFLEET SELECTS

    Helen Miranda Wilson Is Not Worried

    Of the town’s accounting problems, she says, ‘We have people addressing it’

    By

    WELLFLEET — Helen Miranda Wilson, who has been a select board member for nine years, says the town’s current financial crisis and leadership vacuum does not worry her too much.

    “I don’t get worried because I’ve been doing it for 22 years and I’ve seen things get better when they haven’t been good,” she says. “It’s not a drama.”

    In April, Wellfleet’s new town administrator and new town accountant both resigned. The town’s free cash has not been certified by the state, which means there’s $1 million it cannot use. There are so many deficiencies in the town’s books that Interim Administrator Charlie Sumner and two part-time retired accountants are uncovering new problems every day.

    Wilson is unconcerned.

    “It never resolves,” she says. “It continues. Every year there are budget problems, and this year, there is dealing with the structure, which needs to be revamped. But it’s always ongoing.”

    Wilson, 73, grew up in Wellfleet the child of literary lion Edmund Wilson. She attended Barnard College for one year, then the New York Studio School for two. A visual artist her whole life, she has volunteered on town committees for years, including the shellfish advisory board. In 2019, she donated $1 million anonymously to the town to buy 254 acres of shellfish flats off Indian Neck as part of a $2 million purchase, completed with $1 million of taxpayers’ money.

    Her name was made public in June 2019, following a public records request filed by an editor of the Provincetown Banner. Town counsel instructed the town to release her name to comply with the state’s conflict of interest law. But the disclosure came only after months of Wilson’s advocacy and voting on the shellfish flats purchase.

    Wilson defends her actions to this day, stating she had no financial interest in shellfishing and was donating money to help preserve the industry by preventing the flats from being sold for high profits. Her reason for being anonymous was not wanting to discuss the source of the money, which she insists was an inheritance from the death by suicide of her partner, Tim Woodman.

    Furthermore, she says, former Town Administrator Dan Hoort told her it was okay to remain anonymous while advocating that taxpayers pay to purchase the flats.

    Given that Hoort gave her advice contrary to town counsel’s, and that much of the crisis in the accounting department flourished when Hoort was town administrator and she was on the select board, would she do anything differently when it comes to hiring and supervising the next town administrator?

    There is nothing to do, she says, but hope for good applicants. She would not change the way the job is advertised or described.

    “We are lucky to get Charlie, but all the others had something good about them,” she says.

    Wilson claims competence in municipal finances, yet she did not know what the town auditor was referring to three weeks ago when he tried to explain the $765,000 unaccounted for in the town’s books. He said the “agency fund was upside down to the tune of $740,000” and that “it made sense that that entry for $765,000 would go into that agency fund.”

    Wilson says she doesn’t know which agency fund the auditor was referring to. But she told the Wellfleet Democratic Town Committee in a June 10 conference call that the visit with the auditor “was very reassuring to me. It wasn’t their fault that this happened. I see the situation having been very much exacerbated by the pandemic.”

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