What's trendy in Native American art? Well, just about everything if the categories for Santa Fe Indian Market are any indicator.

Ceramic pots, turquoise-and-silver jewelry, beadwork, quillwork, concho belts, wooden carvings and rugs are all in demand at this annual event, which features quality, Native-made art pieces from all over the continent.

Many of the styles are traditional, but the market is also a barometer of what's new and unusual. At the first market in 1922, the black-on-black pots by Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso) were all the rage. In 1995, she and Apache artist Allan Houser won lifetime achievement awards from the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, presenter of Indian Market.

The Museum of New Mexico launched Indian Market to "provide the opportunity to simultaneously educate the potter and the buyer to appreciate Indian art as it had been before its transformation by non-Native cultures into curios and souvenirs," according to SWAIA.

The annual market takes place in an atmosphere of camaraderie among artists and collectors. In 1969, when the market was still small enough to fit under the portal of the Palace of the Governors, The New Mexican said, "The event gives one the opportunity of buying a fine piece of traditional Southwestern Indian art directly from the Indian who made it."

The palette of Native artworks in the 21st century includes distinctly contemporary items, like wall sculptures by Hopi artist Arlo Namingha that are abstract landscapes in woods, limestone and aluminum, and handblown glass figures with silver dust by Tony Jojola of Isleta Pueblo.

Mateo Romero makes realistic paintings of ceremonial dances, as well as more abstract works like lithographs and mixed-media paintings. The son of Cochití Pueblo watercolorist Santiago Romero was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. After undergraduate work at Dartmouth College, he earned a master's degree in printmaking from The University of New Mexico.

In a conversation about today's Native artists, he said influences vary wildly.

"Dan Lomahaftewa was influenced by Hopi petroglyph and pictograph art, so you can look at his work and say, 'This is an example of an artist with kind of a thesis element in his work,' " Romero said. "Then you look at the Fort Marion artists, Plains Indians who were basically imprisoned (at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Fla., starting in 1875 as part of the Indian Wars) and began making ledger art to sell as a means to support themselves and their families. In a sense, it's kind of the beginning of one evolution of Native artists who are producing work for an external audience for money."

The paintings of Fritz Scholder encapsulate a history of painting, Romero said. "His work maybe starts with Cezanne and the modernism of the multiple perspectives, then from there I'd look at Matisse with the kind of flat color fields and fauvism, and then I'd look at the Bay Area abstract figurative stuff like Nathan Oliveira, who was a heavy influence in Scholder's early work. Scholder also borrowed heavily from T.C. Cannon and Bill Soza Warsoldier when he was a student. ... In his history is all that stuff that comes before him."

The "Indian art" world in 2010 embraces video, digital photography and diverse works by installation and performance artists. "And there's actually a street-art movement, where people are doing graffiti art, like Native guerrilla art," Romero said. "The edge is where things occur. It's never the center where the art changes."

Romero doesn't claim to be on that edge. "People who come too close to making a living with art like me get known for a certain kind of work," he said. "But I also think the kind of weird, interesting, quirky stuff that is on the edge becomes the center eventually. Will Wilson is an edgy guy, and right now he might be considered the videograph, digital installation guy who's not that well understood, but in five or 10 years that may totally change. It's just the process of people consuming art and artists."