Sacramento's largest art gallery is not just in the city, it is the city and surrounding Sacramento County.

Paintings, sculptures, murals, mosaics and fountains – more than 700 pieces of public art – are scattered here, there and everywhere, overhead, underfoot, in the middle of the street and sometimes where you least expect them. An oil painting by prominent local artist Alan Post hangs outside the lobby restrooms at a downtown hotel.

Public art belongs to all of us, paid for by developers and public funds.

Next weekend, free walking tours of public art will be introduced to the Second Saturday Art Walk. The tour, suitable for all ages, starts at 4 p.m. at 13th and J streets and features artwork at the Convention Center, the Hyatt Regency and the Sheraton Grand (where you'll see the oddly placed Post painting "Still Life").

Future tours will put the spotlight on Cesar Chavez Plaza and the surrounding area (July), the California Environmental Protection Agency's building (August), Downtown Plaza (September) and the federal courthouse (October).

"We've been wanting to do this for a long time, and I really like the walking-tour idea," says Shelly Willis, who manages the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission's 750-piece Art in Public Places collection. "You're out getting exercise, looking at art and maybe understanding something you would otherwise pass by and never give a second thought. And this person is walking with you, and taking you from place to place so you don't have to have a map, and you have an expert with you."

For some time, the arts commission has offered free public art tours for groups of five or more, and a brochure for self-guided tours of downtown Sacramento's public art will be available soon.

And now SMAC is joining the growing and very popular Second Saturday Art Walk.

"It's a natural match with the Second Saturday audience," says Willis, because it's this opportunity to get out and look at art, and look at art outside of the gallery setting but in areas near the galleries."

The public art tours are designed by Dixie Laws, a local printmaker and painter, and Art in Public Places education coordinator. She's a former elementary schoolteacher.

The value of the public art tours, she says, is that "people who are interested in art can find out where it is, can gain access to the buildings and have a chance to discuss it, learn more about it and just appreciate it."

"If you don't know anything about the art, it's hard to appreciate it just by looking at it," Laws says. "You need somebody to tell you more about it."

Sacramento's public art collection began to grow after the passage of a 1979 city ordinance, which the county later adopted, requiring developers to spend 2 percent of their construction costs on art.

When the city expanded the Convention Center in the mid-1990s to attract large conventions, its $80 million investment included $1 million for art. Both the Sheraton Grand and Hyatt Regency, privately built hotels, had generous art budgets for their projects as well.

The inaugural Second Saturday public art tour focuses on three main mini- galleries: the Convention Center and its eclectic collection, the Sheraton's "classy" art, and the "useful" art incorporated into the architecture at the Hyatt.

The walking tour covers a short distance along 13th Street between J and L streets, with a stop at the multicultural sculpture garden between the Convention Center and the Community Center Theater.

Here is a sampling of public art to be featured during Saturday's tour.

Hyatt Regency: Fred Dalkey's 10 paintings of quintessential Sacramento scenes, Stephanie Taylor's mural "Capitol Park," David Rible's sandblasted glass sculptures, and Michael Riegel's plentiful wrought-iron railings and gates.

Sheraton Grand: Jennifer Bartlett's 60-foot-long multimedia mural "Neighborhood," Robert Brady's sculpture "Winged Figure," Julia Couzens' paintings "Trace Elements," Viola Frey's ceramic mural "The Market Place" and William Wiley's entertaining oil-and-graphite on canvas called "Sacramento California Celebrates Its Colors."

Call The Bee's Dixie Reid, (916) 321-1134.