Pam Ingalls

Pam Ingalls paints in the Russian Impressionist tradition — a lineage that runs through her master teacher Ron Lukas back to the Russian painter Sergei Bongart, and from Bongart back to Ilya Repin, the father of Russian painting. Raised in Spokane, Washington by her artist parents Richard and Marjorie Ingalls, she studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and earned her art degree at Gonzaga University, in the department her father started. Before painting full-time she walked seven thousand miles for peace and built her own house.

Her work spans portraits, still lifes, interiors, and landscapes, all rendered with the directness and tonal command of the Russian school. She has shown in more than 125 national and international juried exhibitions across the United States, Europe, and Africa, and her portrait projects have taken her to villages in Jamaica, Native Alaskan communities on King Island, Guatemala, northeastern India, Maori communities in New Zealand, a Maasai girls' school in Kenya, a refugee center in Chicago, and a single neighborhood in New York City. Ten percent of proceeds typically go to the people painted; another ten percent to their community.

In 2024 the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis — the only major institution in North America devoted entirely to Russian art and culture — gave Ingalls her first museum show, Pam Ingalls, In the Russian Tradition. The museum had never previously exhibited a non-Russian artist. She lives and paints on Vashon Island, Washington, where she has been for nearly thirty years, and teaches workshops nationally.