In the four years since Aqua first came ashore at a boutique hotel on South Beach, the fair has become known for its relaxed vibe, friendly dealers, and fresh, affordable artwork. And the Wynwood warehouse that Aqua added last year as a second venue, doubling its exhibition space, retains that breezy accessibility even without the windows opening into the courtyard at the Collins Avenue hotel of the same name.

San Diego collector Julie Schrager, a newcomer to Art Basel Miami Beach making the rounds of the satellite fairs on Thursday, remarked at the “different feel” of Aqua Wynwood after a spin through Pulse. “That just seemed so raw, and this seems a little more refined,” she said, admiring the high ceilings, permanent walls (enabled by a long-term lease on the facility), and mix of exhibitors.

Schrager is touring with a group of collectors organized by Ann Berchtold, director of the Beyond the Border Gallery in Del Mar, California. “He’s next on my list,” said Schrager as she sized up two of the enlarged postcards in the gallery's booth ($2,000 apiece for the four remaining from the series of 26) that Tijuana native Marcos Ramirez, who goes by Erre, based on postcards he asked tourists to write to loved ones back home.

Berchtold reported selling another work by Ramirez — a pair of eye charts featuring photographs of an Afghani boy and American girl and entitled The Multiplication of Bread ($4,000 each, with five sets from the edition of 9 remaining) over the phone to a California collector who saw them online. A young Miami collector couple was considering Taino Tours Itinerary ($6,000), a large site-specific drawing by University of California, San Diego student Iana Quesnell.

Although the warehouse was quiet and the crowds sparse as the sun began to set on Thursday, the fair’s first full day, Berchtold and New York dealer Sara Tecchia said that they were pleased to have made dozens of new contacts from all around the U.S., as well as a few from Europe. Tecchia, an Aqua veteran, noted that the mood was “more mellow this year,” but said she found collectors still willing to part with modest sums to support emerging artists. Shortly after the fair opened a New York collector had snatched up a $10,000 photorealistic painting in oil on linen, Wonderfuller (2007) by Coloradoan Paul Jacobsen, who is currently in a group show at Mass Moca and whom Tecchia added to her stable just two weeks ago. Two other “eco-sexy” images by the artist were still available, including the 2005 panoramic canvas The Last Spectacle, which places nudes and farm animals before a trash heap of rockets and tractors. Curious passersby were also drawn to New Yorker David Frieds kinetic tabletop sculptures featuring balls of various sizes and colors that rolled in response to human voices: Self Organizing Still Life was available for $34,000; a smaller piece for $28,000.

Another sculpture with moving parts, in the booth of San Francisco gallery and publisher Electric Works, had to be silenced at the request of other exhibitors. Co-director Noah Lang prevented would-be gamers from playing the last of five 1964 pinball machines that veteran Bay Area artist William T. Wiley — the subject of a fall 2009 retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum — painted over this year with cartoonish warnings of global warming. The work, titled Punball: Only One Earth, was priced at $250,000.

Lang observed that the visitors to Aqua Wynwood this season were fewer than in past editions but seemed more serious and better informed. Several had made serious inquiries about a suite of 20 lithographs by perennial art-fair favorite Marcel Dzama. Titled The Cabin of Count Dracula (2005), the portfolio comes in a box fashioned from logs and lined with faux beaver fur in a vision of the vampire’s origin as Dzama’s hometown of Winnipeg. The last three sets from the edition of 10, which also includes a 9-inch Dracula EP by Dzama’s band Albatross Note, are available for $18,000; individual prints in editions of 15 are $900.

Back on the beach, Aqua Hotel was attracting bargain-hunters, who snatched up publications marked down 30 percent at AMMO Books. Among the hits were children’s primers, coloring books, and puzzles featuring illustrations by Charley Harper, whose work has attracted renewed attention, despite his death last year at 85, following the release of the monograph Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life by designer Todd Oldham.  

A stack of $10 greeting-card-sized watercolor-and-pencil drawings by young Japanese artist Mitsuko Takeya was growing thin at the booth of Tokyo dealer Megumi Ogita. The only other work the dealer had sold as of this writing was a $6,000 painting by Tokyo’s Karin Kamijo, which went to a Japanese collector.

Columbus, Ohio, dealer Rebecca Ibels German language skills came in handy at the fair, but it was an established client from New York who had bought a small watercolor by Ohio artist Linda Gall for $650 and a Midwestern collector who bought the traditional realist canvas Sea Water (2008) by Ohio-based painter Laura Sanders, Ibel's “star of the fair.” Sanders's smaller bathing portrait went for $3,800, and two more remained, Direct Sunlight at $3,500 and Undercurrent at $6,500.

Buttons by Boston artist Doug Bolin priced at $50 and $75 proved popular at Newbury Street’s Miller Block Gallery. Gallery principal Ellen Miller said she had returned to Aqua Hotel after sojourns at Scope and Pulse because of the “less foreboding and less competitive” atmosphere. “Unless you’re in the main fair, I don’t think it matters which of the other fairs you’re in,” she said.

She observed that visitors this year also seemed to be taking a more relaxed approach. “It’s quite acceptable to just not buy anything,” she said, whereas in the past, collectors who made the pilgrimage to Art Basel Miami Beach “had to come back with a prize.”