Barbara Quart, 90, always had an interest in art, but it wasn’t until after she retired that she was able to dedicate herself to painting almost daily. Eventually, she accumulated 400 paintings and as she got older, she began to worry what would happen to them — a concern that took on a greater urgency after she was diagnosed with cancer in March.

Now Barbara’s daughter, Alissa Quart, 53, an author of such books as Bootstrapped and Squeezed as well as the executive director of Economic Hardship Reporting Project, is on a mission to find them all a new home.

“I thought it was sort of like a hobby,” Alissa recalls about her mom’s interest in painting when she was a child, “and then it took this illness and having to catalog all this stuff to sort of reassess its value.”

“I was like, ‘I really want to make sure I can see my mom in people’s houses.’ But it then became like, ‘Oh, maybe it’s actually good. Maybe she has a vision, which is even beyond good,’ ” she adds.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants, Barbara grew up painting.

“As a child, I drew all the time,” she says. “One thing I remember powerfully is drawing on an old refrigerator. While my mother was cooking supper, I was creating little scenes of people on streets doing things — and then, with a rag, washing parts off and changing them. All the relatives [who came to the house] made a big fuss.”

However, art school was never in the cards, partly because she “never felt I was good enough.”

Eventually, she paused her pursuit of her passion to pursue a career in academic and raise a family. But, when she was able to retire early 30 years ago, she began to take art classes and soon she was painting almost every day.

Still, outside of occasional group exhibitions, she never aspired to have her works shown in a gallery as a solo artist. “I never tried because I didn’t have to,” she says. “I didn’t care. I was painting for myself.”

For safe keeping, she kept the paintings in storage, but says that she’d go back to them from time to time “and rework them somewhat.”

“A lot has come with experience and, and, and the best part of it is I feel like I’ve become a much better painter, you know, over the years,” Barbara says. “I feel like it’s a road that led to a good place.”

As for where they’d eventually end up, she just knew she didn’t “want my work to end up in a dumpster somewhere.”

It was her mother’s cancer diagnosis this past March that spurred Alissa — who first wrote about her project in a New York Times opinion piece this past July — to start selling and donating the paintings.

Alissa says that she has given the paintings to her friends as well as other people such as her mom’s cleaning woman — and she even conducted a sale in her apartment building.

“So now there’s like 10 people in the building who have 10 paintings” she says. “And then in upstate, we sold them to random people. It was like a tag sale. It was awesome. There were people who bought them that didn’t own any art.”

Alissa acknowledges that the project gave her insight to her mom’s work as an artist.

“I have a better understanding of how she sees things,” she says. “Like I’ll be in nature in places that she painted and I’ll see differently. She painted cows a lot, and the cows looked really surreal. Or like the sunset looks really psychedelic or the reflective properties of the pond are very notable to me.”

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As part of the project, Alissa makes one important request: asking the new owners of the paintings to send her a photo of where their works are hanging.

Being able to see her paintings displayed at their new homes has been “wonderful” for Barbara. “I love it,” she says. “It’s lovely to see them as part of somebody’s life.”

Information about Barbara’s paintings can be found her Instagram account.