Van Pappelendam gained a doctorate in 1929 from the University of Chicago, where she helped establish both the Department of Art in 1924 and the Renaissance Club, and then taught in the University Department of Art part time from 1919 to 1948, overlapping with the Art Institute where she taught for fifty years, from 1909-1959. For a time, she also taught summer classes at Illinois State Normal School (now Illinois State University).

Amazingly for all of the energy she devoted to teaching, she is equally and perhaps best remembered as an oil painter, whose subjects included Southwest landscapes and scenes from Florence, Arizona. She won numerous awards and "Had her work included in 250 art exhibitions both here and abroad." (Hunt, 80)

Despite her enormous teaching load, Van Pappelendam was somehow a very productive artist, painting mainly during the summer months and when on a leave from the Art Institute. Her work, executed mainly in oil, included impressionistic landscapes, flowers and views of everyday life. Some of her painting locations include Chicago and Normal, Illinois, 1909-1915; Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1916; Mexico, in 1928-1936, where she studied with Diego Rivera in 1930; Europe, 1937, 1958-1960; and Keokuk, Iowa, 1938-1940.

She also painted extensively in the American Southwest, including Colorado, 1917; and California, 1918-1919, 1941, 1949, 1956-1957. She painted in Arizona, Utah, Nevada and Santa Fe, New Mexico, from 1920-1927. Perhaps her most important paintings during the 1950s were created in northern New Mexico, from 1950-1955.

During her long and varied career, she encountered a number of artists with large reputations, when a student and after, who influenced her work, including George Bellows, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, Kenyon Cox, Charles W. Hawthorne, Nicholas Roerich, Karl Buehr, and Charles Francis Browne.

The artist lived and worked in Chicago until 1962, moving to Tucson, Arizona, until 1966, when illness forced her into a convalescent home in Pico Rivera, California. Her last years were passed in a Downey, California, convalescent home. She died February 10, 1974, in Norwalk, California, on her ninety-first birthday.

Laura van Pappelendam's works are in the collections of the Illinois State Museum, Springfield; University of Chicago; John H. Vanderpoel Memorial Art Gallery, Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago; Lee County Historical Society, Keokuk, Iowa; and Art League, Oak Park, Illinois

The U.S. Embassy Residence in Dublin, Ireland, exhibited her work for an extended period from 1957-1961, but Chicago was the center of her art exhibition experience with most of the two hundred fifty shows in which she participated taking place there.

However, just as her painting travels ranged widely, so, too, her exhibitions in New York City venues like the Whitney Museum of American Art, Riverside Museum, and Academy of Allied Arts; as well as the City Art Museum, St. Louis; Women Painters of America, Wichita, Kansas; Sesquicentennial International Exposition, Philadelphia; Women's International Exposition, Detroit; Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; and National College of Art, Dublin.

Sources: Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West, Jean S. Hunt, Walking With Women Through Chicago History II