[1] As a child, she spent summers in Greensboro, Vermont, with her parents, as well as attended a number of residential camps focusing on the arts.
[1] Barr often traveled to Europe with her parents from the age of 14 onwards, meeting influential artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall and collectors like Peggy Guggenheim.
[2] There Barr took classes in art history from Leo Steinberg and in color theory from Sewell Sillman, who was Josef Albers' studio assistant at Yale.
[1] Back in New York, she worked for a time as a secretary to the art dealer Steven Spector [3] Then in 1964, Barr traveled to Paris, France on a Fulbright scholarship, along with fellow artist and Fulbright scholars Nancy Graces, who would later marry Richard Serra who joined their group in Paris, and Philip Glass.
Her extensive travels throughout Europe, South and East Asia, and the Pacific were part of this research project.