Abby_Sher_Photo Abby Sher was a student at UC Berkeley in the early '60's, at the time of the Free Speech Movement, a formative time for her politically. She graduated from UCLA with a degree in French Literature. After some teaching, she went back to UCLA to study Linguistics and received a Masters degree. While on a pre-doctoral fellowship in Clinical Linguistics at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, looking into abnormal language acquisition, she originated the category, "Elective Mutism" for the DSMIII, the diagnostic specifications manual used in psychiatric classification.

In 1982, Abby made the hour-long documentary "Dudley Carter" about nonagenarian ax sculptor, Dudley Carter. He was a woodsman and timber cruiser turned WPA artist, born in 1891 and featured in the Diego Rivera Mural, Pan American Unity, painted while he and Rivera were working in the Art in Action Pavilion at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The film showed in the Seattle Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art's "What's Happening" series, the Field Museum's "Anthropology on Film Festival," the American Museum of Natural History's "Margaret Mead Festival," the Provincial Museum in British Columbia and a few other places. It won a Cine Golden Eagle.

In 1984, Abby began work on Edgemar. This project entailed the renovation of existing warehouses and new construction in Santa Monica. She hired Frank Gehry as the architect and, at the same time, began work on the formation of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, of which she is the Founder. Abby owned and operated Edgemar until June 2007. She commissioned installations and events, created related posters and postcards, and wrote mesostics as a tribute to John Cage for the sound installation.

In 1992, Abby traveled as one of Jerry Brown's ragtag band of revolutionary warriors, sleeping on constituents' floors in Michigan and Illinois during the primaries - an exciting time, as Jerry was briefly in the lead in his bid that year for the U.S. presidency.

Abby has been involved in social justice and social change work since the late '70's, often as a board member and in a variety of other roles with organizations such as Liberty Hill Foundation, Chrysalis, Westside Family Health Services, Jewish Funds for Justice, and Centinela Youth Services.

In June 2006, having difficulty reconciling what was going on in Iraq and the fact that we were being asked to ignore it, Abby developed a project called "A Red Line Connects Us" in which she painted a red line in tempera down the middle of the sidewalks of Santa Monica for one hour each afternoon, walking silently at the rate of approximately seven steps per minute. Although she had the endorsement of the Santa Monica Arts Commission, after four days she was stopped by the City; but continued walking in a public place at the same rate for one hour a day, five days a week, for six months and wrote a blog about her experiences. She developed a website, aredlineconnectsus.org, on which one hears the sound of a drip, intended to remind us of the continuing toll of violence on us all and gives the approximate rate at which she walked, although she eventually walked considerably more slowly. The blog is retired and all but one image has been removed from the site, but she keeps the site up with its drip as a reminder.