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The Seattle Art Fair, a four-day event with 62 galleries from around the world set up in the WaMu Theater, hoped to entice people to the area in the midst of an economic and development boom.Credit Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

SEATTLE — Paul Allen came ready to shop. Mr. Allen, a billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and one of this city’s major cultural patrons, strolled the aisles of the inaugural Seattle Art Fair on Thursday, looking to add to his formidable art collection.

“Just walking around, I’ve probably seen a half-dozen paintings that I would consider,” he said, taking a break early in the V.I.P. preview. Several staff members and his private art adviser lingered nearby. Mr. Allen had a leg up on other buyers: He founded the fair. A regular visitor to the Venice Biennale, he was inspired to start an art showcase in his hometown that would import a sophisticated, international art scene. After two years of planning, it opened here last week to ardent curiosity.

“You do something like this, and I had no idea whether it was going to be 100 people, 1,000, or 10,000 people,” Mr. Allen said. “But we’re well over that.” Through Sunday, when the fair ended, more than 11,000 attended, organizers said. A host of satellite fairs, events and open studios were scheduled to coincide with it; Mayor Ed Murray stopped by. And Mr. Allen did acquire some work, including a small Wayne Thiebaud pastel of a tin of sardines. “Because I used to eat sardines with my father,” Mr. Allen explained.

With the backing of Vulcan, Mr. Allen’s investment company, the Seattle Art Fair was a well-funded if experimental initiative to bridge geographic and social divides. Spurred by Mr. Allen’s involvement, blue-chip galleries like Pace, Gagosian and David Zwirner signed up for booths. Organizers hoped it would entice people to travel to Seattle, in the midst of a significant economic and development boom. Seattleites wanted a light shone on their homegrown work, less heralded, perhaps, than that of nearby cities. Dealers wanted to harness the newfound wealth of the tech class, and curators hoped to highlight a connection between Pacific Northwest and Pacific Rim culture and artists.

“I saw that there were some New York dealers participating, I thought it would be interesting to see and support the city,” said the New York collector Beth Rudin DeWoody, who came on a whim and wound up buying a half-dozen works from dealers from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Seattle, including a piece by the local artist Jeffry Mitchell. As for prices, “it was a range,” she said. “I love finding art for under $1,000, which was very possible there.”

There were also some big-ticket sales, including “Revolution #2,” by the Chilean artist Iván Navarro, that went for over $100,000 at the Paul Kasmin Gallery. Pieces by Oscar Murillo and Christopher Williams also fetched five and six figures. To cement the idea that this was “a major league show,” said Max Fishko, a managing partner of Art Market Productions, the Brooklyn company that produced the fair, “we needed those sales.”

One prize was a buyer like Sarah Barton, a Seattle-area doctor whose husband, Richard Barton, is a founder of Expedia and Zillow.com. With homes on the West and East Coasts, and Zillow’s expanding headquarters here, Ms. Barton, 48, was briskly eyeing pieces, including a wall-height Wim Wenders photograph of a Buddha. “I just look at what jumps out at me,” she said. Ms. Barton typically buys photography and works by emerging artists at fairs, she said. With 62 galleries from around the world set up in the WaMu Theater here, “I feel like the hit rate should be pretty decent,” she said as she browsed on opening night on Thursday. An image of the Wenders work, displayed at the James Cohan Gallery booth, went out to Mr. Barton’s assistant.

For local artists and gallery owners, it was a chance to show their work on a larger stage. When he first heard about the fair, “I was skeptical,” said Mr. Mitchell, 57, a ceramist and printmaker, “because there are plenty of really good massive art fairs. My second-city insecurity kicked in and I thought, it’s not going to compare well. Seattle has always been a regional art center, not a major one.” But he was pleasantly surprised, especially when 13 local galleries were included, alongside a few from Portland, Ore. (His work was shown at two booths.) “Now I’m really stoked,” he said.

Catharine Clark, a dealer from San Francisco, had her eye on infiltrating the Seattle market. “Like many people, we were hoping to educate the growing number of people involved in art and technology on the West Coast,” she said. “Everybody’s curious about this money.”

They do collect, said Greg Kucera, who has had an eponymous gallery in Seattle for 32 years, “but not to the degree that we think they should be.”

With an economy shaped by Microsoft and Amazon, the rich in Seattle are growing richer faster than in any other city, including New York and San Jose, Calif., according to a recent study by the Brookings Institution. Downtown is experiencing more real estate development — like a new Amazon hub — than it has in over 10 years.

But this tech-fueled growth does not necessarily add up to support for the arts.

Andy Cunningham, the founder of Zero1, a San Jose nonprofit that focuses on the intersection of art and technology, explained, “You have to sort of show the tech world what to appreciate about art.”

Greg Bell, the senior curator at Vulcan, said the directive was to make the fair “as populist as possible” with public installations. (Single-day tickets were $20; larger fairs, like the Armory Show in New York, cost $45.) “I just think about people who are working in the gaming industry and all the artwork they produce,” Mr. Bell said. “How do we pique their interests?” Programming included sculpture and video at the Living Computer Museum, also endowed by Mr. Allen.

At the fair, Mr. Allen’s presence, alongside other major collectors like Jon Shirley (another Microsoft alum) and the philanthropist Virginia Wright, generated as much buzz as the mayor’s.

Elizabeth Sullivan, the director of Pace Gallery, was a first-time visitor to Seattle. She sounded surprised by the outpouring of interest. “There was a line!” she said. “People were asking wonderful questions,” especially about the video work by teamLab, a Japanese digital art collective. Like many exhibitors, Ms. Sullivan highlighted tech-based work and Pacific Rim artists, including the Japanese Pop Art painter Yoshitomo Nara, one of whose pieces sold for an undisclosed price.

Brian Paquette, 33, an interior designer here, stood in the Roq La Rue booth, with drawings by area artists, thrilled to glimpse a Louise Nevelson wall sculpture nearby. “It’s really, really exciting for Seattle,” he said later. “No, seriously. This is, like, beyond amazing.” He bought a work by Joe Rudko, a Seattle artist who was also represented at Out of Sight, a satellite event running through Aug. 21.

Held in a raw space above a nearby train station, it drew more than 1,000 people in the first two days, said Greg Lundgren, an organizer. The work leaned larger, performative and more experimental; at the opening party, two men dressed as football players grappled, on the verge of making out.

“I’ve been watching this really slow swell of the art scene here,” said Kirsten Anderson, owner of Roq La Rue and an Out of Sight curator. “This is the push that makes it feel like there are eyeballs on it, which makes it competitive, which makes better art.”

Ms. Sullivan, of Pace, said she would like to return.

Mr. Fishko, the fair’s director, said the chances of another installment were 100 percent. “People like it,” he said. “It will be back.”

Or as Mr. Lundgren, who is already planning Out of Sight 2016, put it: “I think it was something that Seattle’s really been thirsty for for a long time, and I think sometimes you don’t realize what you’re thirsty for until you taste it.”