Robbin Ami Silverberg

Robbin Ami Silverberg, the proprietor of Dobbin Mills, located the source code of her career as designer, producer and dreamer of books to a drawing she created of a fantasy world she called "The Book Bubble." Strangely or not so strangely, the Book Bubble she imagined at age eight anticipates the artist's lifestyle at Dobbin Mills, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which she calls "a green haven in a large courtyard," consisting of a 1300 sq. ft. garden "filled with flowers, herbs, vegetables and a range of plants for papermaking purposes, including 3 paper mulberry (or Kozo) trees." Her work can be divided into three areas of art-making: solo artist books, collaborative artist books, and paper installations. Consistent to all is an "obsessive need to fully articulate [the ideas being treated] in every detail." A most astonishing example of her varied collaborations is a project the artist undertook at the Artist Proof Studio, a printmaking facility set up for Black community artists in South Africa, with nineteen local artists, on the theme of creation mythology. The book, Emandulo Re-Creation (Emandulo means "in the beginning," in Zulu), became a double-spine exquisite corpse, "forcing a mix between artists and their artwork that had not interacted before: A Post-Apartheid statement." Perhaps most astonishingly, Ms Silverberg began and completed the entire job in 8 days.