First Seattle Art Fair Opens

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"Ex Image" a 2015 work by the Seattle artist Damien Gilley.Credit Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

SEATTLE – The mayor dropped by. So did Paul Allen and several other “local billionaires,” as one visitor referred to them. When the inaugural Seattle Art Fair opened for business on Thursday, the crowd included titans from the tech world, as well as Starbucks executives and collectors from San Francisco and Vancouver.

They turned up for a preview of the fair, which runs through Sunday and drew representatives from blue-chip dealers like Pace, Gagosian and David Zwirner from New York, in no small part because it had the backing of Mr. Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and major art collector. He co-produced the fair via his investment firm, Vulcan.

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Paul Allen on the opening night.Credit Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

“After going to the biennale in Venice, I just thought it would be worth a chance,” he said on Thursday, as he took stock of the booths of 62 galleries, from the Pacific Northwest as well as Miami, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Seoul. The fair was conceived as a blend of commercial and curated work, with video art and installation alongside paintings and sculpture, at the WaMu Theater next to CenturyLink Field, the stadium that’s home to the Seattle Seahawks, the football team Mr. Allen owns.

“This is a huge branding opportunity,” said James Cohan, of the James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea, an art fair veteran. His artists include Spencer Finch, whose solar-powered ice cream truck was parked outside, serving up free soft-serve, in a piece called “Sunset.”

Organizers of the fair, including the Brooklyn company Art Market Productions, which specializes in regional fairs, hoped to entice interest with community projects and site-specific displays, including one at the Living Computer Museum, which Mr. Allen also endowed. And the fair itself spawned a host of satellite exhibitions, like the nearby Out of Sight show, which featured mainly Seattle artists, and also opened on Thursday evening. Visitors to the main fair traipsed over afterward, to an unfinished space above a train station, where they found a few of the same galleries and artists that were at WaMu, and a raucous celebration of the scene.