BUENOS AIRES— While Chinese and Indian contemporary art have each experienced a dramatic “boom” in recent years — though that word hasn’t dared to be uttered since last year — interest in Latin American art has been more of a slow and steady burn. Led by curators and collectors like Eugenio Lopez, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and Mari Carmen Ramírez, among others, the field has been revitalized in the United States over the past decade, with heightened interest leading to higher prices, more cachet, and more exposure.

In the last year alone there has been a flurry of Latin American exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad. New York's Museum of Modern Art opened a joint show of Argentine artist León Ferrari and the Brazilian modernist Mira Schendel last month, and has a traveling mid-career retrospective of the Mexican Conceptualist Gabriel Orozco opening in December. London's Tate Modern offered a mid-career retrospective of the contemporary Brazilian Conceptualist Cildo Meireles, which opens at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts next month, and previously at the Tate's Turbine Hall there was Colombian artist Doris Salcedo's jagged floor crack.

On the fair front, Mexico City’s México Arte Contemporáneo fair (MACO, aka Zona Maco) has grown from marginally international to fabulously global in the last few years, drawing in artists, curators — former Whitney Museum associate curator Shamim Momin curated the Jumex collection exhibition there this year — and gobs of dealers. And now, ArteBA, the second-largest and longest-running Latin American fair, and the only one that focuses solely on Latin American artists, is receiving similar international attention.

This year’s ArteBA, which closed Tuesday, featured approximately 800 Latin American artists from 90 primarily South American galleries, plus a few visitors (two from the U.S.; three from Spain). One of the few fairs to operate as a nonprofit, with a clear mission to foster artists rather than profit off of galleries, ArteBA succeeds in overcoming the commercial and money-driven stigma of the typical art fair and brings in a diverse public. More than 120,000 visitors poured into Buenos Aires's La Rural Stadium and Exhibition Hall, opposite the Opera Pampa, during the fair’s five-day run, and the significant percentage of non-buying visitors made the fair feel like an eclectic, and well-curated, Latin American exhibition, spanning early 20th century to contemporary works.

“Because we are a nonprofit, we have assumed this objective of bringing contemporary art to people,” says Fundacion ArteBA board member Marga Munez-Vargas de Macaya. “We really look forward to many people visiting the fair. It’s not only for collectors. This is a very open fair.”

And open it was. Weaving in and out of the spacious booths were not just high-profile collectors and curators — Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, Anibal Jozami, Eduardo F. Costantini, Tate Modern Latin American art curator Julieta Gonzalez, Carmen Ramírez, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and Alberto de la Cruz, son of Rosa de la Cruz — but also a sea of mostly Spanish-speaking families, couples, and hip-looking 20-somethings. Teenagers with PoMo haircuts convened in the graffiti-adorned, Chandon Winery–sponsored Barrio Joven (or “Young Neighborhood”) section, where 20 hand-selected galleries displayed work ranging from advertising graphics to illustration, street art, installations, and multimedia art. Barrio Joven took up approximately one-fifth of the airy L-shaped convention, and about a third of the fair’s total $30,000 in prize money was bestowed on the most promising young artists and galleries included there.

As you walked around ArteBA, a few boldface artists stood out, many of whom would have been barely known outside of South America only a few years ago. Léon Ferrari’s calligraphic paintings drew attention, as did works by fellow Argentinians Antonio Berni, Luis Felipe Noé, Luis Fernando Benedit (who simultaneously had a show at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires), Xul Solar, Emilio Pettoruti, Eduardo Stupía, Julio Le Parc, Jorge Macchi, Leandro Erlich, and Flavia da Rin, as well as Uruguay’s Joaquín Torres García and Chile’s Samy Benmayor. But the fair also beamed a spotlight on less familiar members of the South American avant-garde, especially emerging talent from Chile and Argentina.

Daniel Abate Gallery, Buenos Aires’s hip barometer for up-and-coming artists, had front and center an installation depicting a typical Argentinean bread stand by Eduardo Navarro, whose works often focus on the commercial, economic, and social implications of modernization. It hadn’t sold at the time of ARTINFO's visit, but collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros bought a print from Navarro’s “Solicitud de Empleo” series for about $7,000. Meanwhile, a mixed-media collage by Catalina León, who received the ArteBA–Petrobras Prize for the Visual Arts in 2007 and has works at Argentina’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario (MACRO), was going for $14,000, as was Argentine artist Sandro Pereira's sculptural photo montage in the shape of a head.

At the equally cool Dabbah Torrejon gallery, also located in Buenos Aires, a three-dimensional, large-scale oil painting overlaid with acrylic and collage by Manuel Esnoz hadn't sold yet for $20,000, while a rainbow geometric abstraction by the more seasoned Fabián Burgos tricked the eye, making one believe it was two paintings and not just one. Burgos’s optical illusions continued around the corner at the Miami-based Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, where an almost identical painting from the same series hung. The mischievous works were priced at $15,000 at both galleries, and while each had attracted scores of onlookers (most repeating the same dance: a double take followed by a close-up inspection), neither had red dots yet.

Halfway through the fair, Argentine gallery director von Hartz admitted that a work by young Argentine artist Ivana Brenner, one of the gallery’s newest, was the “first and only that we sold at this fair,” for about $4,000. “Because of the financial situation, everyone’s a bit more quiet,” she added.

The most expensive works at the fair could be found at the booth of Argentine veteran Daniel Maman Fine Art, where a mixed-media relief measuring roughly 9½ by 5 by 12½ feet by Juan Battle Planas was front and center, at a price of $500,000. Also on offer were an untitled work by figurative artist Antonio Berni, for $180,000, and a pair of paintings by Luis Felipe Noé, titled Alegoría de la Ganadería and priced at $180,000 each. Chandon Winery, which for the eighth consecutive year kicked off the buying at ArteBA, bought a photograph titled La caída de un sistema (The Fall of a System) photo 3 by Charly Nijensohn. It will be added to a contemporary photography collection that Chandon is building, to be exhibited at the company’s headquarters in Mendoza, Argentina.

Not surprisingly, the fair may have been less pocked with red dots than hoped for, but gallerists still seemed more upbeat than their North American and European counterparts on the fair circuit earlier this year, thanks perhaps in part to an increase in high-profile collectors and curators. While it may not seem as if it’s happening with the same force as Asian art, Latin American artists are slowly but surely carving out a niche within the mainstream art world — a perfect pace for Latin America.