[2][3] Abby Weed was born in 1902 in Minnesota and was educated at Vassar College.

She established the Ben and Abby Grey Foundation to sponsor artists after her husband died in 1956.

[2] Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Grey undertook curatorial projects such as Fourteen Contemporary Iranians (1962–65), curated by Parviz Tanavoli and Turkish Art Today (1966–70), each of which toured the United States; Communication Through Art (1964), which opened simultaneously in Istanbul, Tehran, and Lahore, before traveling throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Asia, and eastern Africa; and One World Through Art.

[4][5] By 1979, Grey had become one of American's prominent collectors of Asian and Middle Eastern art.

[1] In 1974 she established the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.