Anna Barry (née Anna Barshefsky), painter, printmaker and teacher, was born to Russian émigrés Max and Ida Goldberg Barshefsky on 20 May 1909 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the 1930 U.S. Federal Census her family name is changed to Barish and they are listed as living in Bronx, New York. It is not yet known where she had formal art training but she was listed as a teacher on the 1940 U.S. Census. She married artist Ira Moskowitz on 13 November 1938 and they began frequenting New Mexico. They befriended such luminaries as Mabel Dodge Lujan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Oscar Berninghaus, and many others who had become attracted to the unique landscape. Barry and Moskowitz moved to Taos, New Mexico in 1944 and remained until 1949 when they returned to New York.

One can’t help but wonder if Anna Barry studied with serigrapher/painter Louie Ewing while in the Southwest. Barry was inspired by the various cultures that co-mingled in New Mexico, creating color serigraphs and lithographs of pueblos, Christian church iconography, indigenous ceremonies, cowboys, and towns and outposts in the region. A small exhibition of her work was hung in the East Gallery of the New Mexico Museum of Art in March 1949. The work of Anna Barry is represented in the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Anna Barry Moskowitz died in New York on 31 October 2001.