Well-known local artist Pam Ingalls, whose light-filled oil paintings have long graced galleries of Vashon and beyond, has achieved a career milestone: her first museum show, at the Russian Museum of Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The exhibition, “Pam Ingalls, In the Russian Tradition,” opened on July 29 and will close on Sunday, Sept. 15.

The museum is the only major institution in North America devoted entirely to Russian art and culture from the entire scope of Russia’s history. For Ingalls, who paints and teaches in the Russian Impressionist tradition, the museum is a treasure trove — and a place she never dreamed her work would be shown.

But that changed last year when Ingalls and her husband Michael Monteleone visited Minneapolis. Ingalls had written to the curator of the museum, Dr. Masha Zavialova, in advance to see if she could get a special tour of the museum’s back rooms, full of paintings, which Zavialova said would indeed be possible.

But about an hour into the four-hour tour, led by Zavialova, Ingalls said she was shocked by the curator’s suggestion that Ingalls’ work be shown at the museum as well.

“I about fainted,” Ingalls said.

The resulting exhibition of art by Pam Ingalls features 32 of her paintings — many of them paintings of Vashon Island, as well as portraits, still lifes and interior subjects.

Seeing these works hanging on the museum’s walls was an emotional experience for Ingalls.

“In June, when I first walked into the beautiful museum room full of all kinds of subjects I’d painted through the years, I teared up,” she said. “It was a dream come true.”

And later, at a reception for the exhibition, came another surprise, when the director of the museum told her the museum had never before shown a non-Russian artist.

“I feel so lucky that I was in the right place at the right time,” Ingalls said. “And I’m really grateful to Dr. Zavialova for her concept of showing an American painter who learned from Russian teachers.”

Ingalls said that her master teacher was Russian Impressionist, Ron Lukas, who had passed on the knowledge of a long line of Russian and Ukrainian teachers before him, all the way back to Ilya Repin, who is known as the father of Russian painting.

The award-winning work of Ingalls has been widely collected and exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Africa, and juried into more than 125 national and international shows.

Oil paintings by Ingalls are now also on view at Vashon Center for the Arts, in a six-person exhibition titled “Art Becomes You.” Find out more at vashoncenterforthearts.org, and learn more about the Russian Museum of Art at tmora.org.

“Sticks,” by Pam Ingalls, is one of several paintings of Vashon included in her show at The Russian Museum of Art. (Courtesy photo)