Starting today, area art lovers who venture out to Rockville can treat themselves to an new exhibition that repurposes fashion from a bygone era.

For The September Show at Rockville Civic Center Park’s Glenview Mansion Art Gallery, mixed-media artist Sanzi Kermes has screen-printed poems and patterns onto theater costumes acquired from Center Stage in Baltimore.

Glenview was once a hub for D.C.-area socialites. Kermes’ redesigned costumes are likely to transport viewers back in time with a uniquely reflective view on fashion.

In retrospect, the medium of clothing is an unusual one for her.

“I know nothing about fashion,” she says. “I don’t look at magazines and I barely recognize what people are wearing.”

Kermes is versed in contemporary fine art, rather than clothing design. She has worked out of her studio in Baltimore’s Remington neighborhood for nearly two decades, save for a period when she traveled to England to earn her MFA degree at Leeds Beckett University.

The roots for this exhibition took hold in May 2015, when she visited Glenview Mansion for a site visit and fell in love with the space. She and gallery director Julie Farrell agreed to reserve the Lyon room, the section of the house once occupied by madame Irene Lyon, who Farrell says lived there from 1926 through the mid-1950s.

Despite having booked the venue, Kermes had not picked a medium. Shortly after, however, she attended a textile screen-printing workshop at Baltimore Print Studios. At the end of summer 2015, she learned that Center Stage was having a costume sale.

“A lot of things just fell into place,” Kermes says.

With the help of a fashion consultant, she picked dozens of costumes, many of them marred with makeup stains, rust spots, and tears. She had to restore them one by one, a process that took several months and proved to be creative before she even picked up any fabric ink.

Later this spring, Kermes set to work on the most challenging aspect of her work for this exhibit: fabric-printing.

“The learning curve was pretty steep, and there were a lot of false starts,” she says.

It is a meticulous, careful art, much different than paper screen-printing or other types of painting in which Kermes is more practiced, she says.

One of the first items she worked on was a “free-cycled” theater backdrop once used by another theater company in Baltimore. On that somewhat experimental piece, she achieved a “mottled” effect by printing with far more layers than she used on the costumes, she says.

For the clothes, she had to create an underpinning for each item. She quickly learned that two was the magic number of layers for most of them; any more would saturate or distort the appearance. One by one, she printed a layer of colors and patterns, followed by another layer printed with senryu—unrhymed, present-tense, structured Japanese poetry.

“Patterns change each time/Only constant middle grid filled/Streetscapes going nowhere,” one reads.

Kermes carefully placed the 17-syllable poems on each article. “I wanted a narrative that I could thread…but it needed to be brief and succinct,” she says.

Kirk Shannon, who works for the arts management firm Flickeria, has helped to publicize Kermes’ exhibition. He says he sees a gender-related significance to Kermes, a female mixed-media artist, repurposing clothes from a more conservative time.

“Most clothes are made by men,” says Shannon, who has worked as a fashion editor in New York. “This is a woman who is repurposing clothes originally designed by men for women.”

Kermes sees the trend in fashion, but doesn’t buy into it, comparing it to a persistent gender bias in the arts world. “I can start to buy into all this bias against women artists, and yes it does exist, but I am not willing to bow to it,” she says. “I’m just going to charge forward and do what I am doing.”

Farrell says Kermes has taken great care in placing her artwork in the historic venue. She said this week that she looks forward to seeing the redesigned costumes on display next to Mrs. Lyon’s old dressing room.

“It’s an installation that has taken into account the history of the house and the people who lived in the mansion,” Farrell says. And yet, “it changes the whole space. It can’t help but bring a smile to your face.”

“The September Show” runs from Tuesday, Sept. 6, to Friday, Sept. 30, at the Glenview Mansion at 603 Edmonston Drive in Rockville, Md. The opening reception, complete with a jazz band and food, will be from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 11.