The entire heart of downtown fills up with Native art during the annual Santa Fe Indian Market, which takes place Aug. 23–24. Tribal Arts dealers and aficionados also gather in Santa Fe during Indian Market for the Whitehawk Antique Indian Art Show, this year celebrating its 30th anniversary.

The Plaza area and downtown in general offer a mixture of world-class art and tourist-oriented shops, along with restaurants and museums. Within walking distance of downtown is the one-of-a-kind Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. And just off the Plaza, the New Mexico Museum of Art presents "Flux: Reflections on Contemporary Glass" June 10–Sept. 21.

Art Van Go, a free van service sponsored by a selection of galleries, hotels, and restaurants, shuttles visitors between sites, notes Latricia Gonzales-McKowsky, president of the Santa Fe Gallery Association and one of those who conceived the van shuttle idea. Visitors who aren’t accustomed to Santa Fe’s 7,000-foot elev-ation can end up fatigued after a long day of walking in and out of local galleries, Gonzales-McKowsky explains.

Many of Santa Fe’s hotels—notably the historic La Fonda, the Eldorado Hotel, the Inn and Spa at Loretto, and the Hilton Santa Fe—have exceptional original art on their properties and in hotel shops. La Posada de Santa Fe Resort & Spa carries the concept a step further by partnering with local galleries to provide a rotating selection of painting and sculpture—all for sale—in the hotel’s guest rooms and public spaces.

The city of Santa Fe provides shuttle bus service (the "M" bus) between downtown and Museum Hill, site of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology, the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, and the Museum of International Folk Art. Visitors can enjoy a different perspective on Native art at MIAC through Jan. 4, 2009, with "Comic Art Indigène." The show looks at the contemporary American Indian experience through storytelling in comics and comic-inspired art, including colorful, pictorial expressions of humor, adventure, and the fantastic in media including ancient pictographs as well as present-day graphic art.

You’ll need a car to reach other art spots in town—including the newly expanded Center for Contemporary Arts—and in nearby communities, but they’re well worth the drive. Among them: Acres of sculpture gardens at Shidoni Foundry and Galleries, just north of town in Tesuque; galleries and shops, both funky and first-class, in villages such as Madrid, Cerrillos, and Truchas. And at Pojoaque Pueblo, 20 minutes north of Santa Fe, are two venues of note for traditional and contemporary American Indian art, the Poeh Center and the Roxanne Swentzell Tower Gallery. An hour or so farther north, Taos is a history-rich art destination worth a trip of its own.

If there were such a thing as an art lover’s paradise, it would of course be set in an aesthetically pleasing environment—with a mountain backdrop and soft-edged Pueblo-style architecture, perhaps—and have an eminently agreeable climate, and it would offer a wide selection of top-rated restaurants. And a summer season of internationally acclaimed opera wouldn’t hurt, either. It’s all in Santa Fe.