Baker Artist Portfolios

Sanzi Kermes is the progeny of immigrant grandparents (Bohemia and Italy). At age seven, Sanzi declared that she wanted to be an artist, but her family was less than enthusiastic, encouraging her to choose a path other than “starving artist.” She complied, pursuing a double major in geography and advertising at Syracuse University. 

In 1995, Sanzi left her job as a cartographer and began to focus her energy on an art career.  Her life took two extraordinary turns: In 2003, she became a young widow after her husband’s death from brain cancer; in 2005, she welcomed a daughter, Sabina. Sanzi earned her Master of Art degree in Contemporary Fine Art Practice from Leeds Beckett University, in Leeds, UK (2008). 

Sanzi's art practice marries the love for her late husband, an avid Scrabble player, and mother to an autistic young woman.  Sanzi reports, “My daughter goes non verbal when she is overwhelmed. It is through this lens, this sensibility, that the use of  language in its shortest form (senryu)  to mine the game of Scrabble means that my daughter can use words and that she isn’t restricted to making sentences  — I have recently discovered that she sees most words as being similar; that there is no differentiation for her between a noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, or adjective.  My work is the marriage of brevity and organization.”

Though it has a finite set of conditions—a 15 by 15 square grid and 100 letters—the permutations are seemingly endless.  Sanzi’s love of language and visual arts has catapulted her work into the current oeuvre of screen prints, letterpress printing, and senryu (non-nature based haiku). Her work as a cartographer has greatly influenced the art she creates, as the screen prints are reminiscent of the Rectangular Survey System devised by the Land Ordinance of 1785. 

Sanzi lives in Baltimore with her daughter.