DAVID IRELAND’S 500 CAPP STREET FINDS BUYER

David Ireland’s house at 500 Capp Street in San Francisco has been saved. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Kenneth Baker reports that Carlie Wilmans, granddaughter of arts benefactor Phyllis Wattis and director of the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, personally bought the 1886 Victorian building for $895,000 to ensure that San Francisco would not lose a cultural treasure. The art public knows 500 Capp Street, at least by reputation, as a repository of Ireland’s art in many media and as an evolving environmental artwork in its own right. In early January, the house was soon to be offered for sale. Health problems had forced the seventy-seven-year-old Ireland to move out nearly three years before, and he needed to sell quickly to secure a onetime tax advantage. Various plans to preserve the house, including its possible annexation by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, had already failed. Wilmans, an art collector and SF MoMA board member, first learned about the jeopardy facing Ireland’s house at an acquisitions-committee meeting, where former chief curator Madeleine Grynsztejn presented a work of his for approval. Not long afterward, Wilmans decided to buy the house. “I knew if it went on the market, a developer would come and snap it up,” she said.