With Money It Will Change,” reads a message on a bumper sticker in a new drawing by Brooklyn-based artist Mads Lynnerup at Austin, Texas, gallerist Lora Reynoldss booth at this year’s Pulse Art Fair. The pithy phrase could serve as a motto for the fifth edition of the Art Basel Miami Beach satellite, which moved to the former NADA fair digs at Miami's Ice Palace this year and saw brisk sales in line with what appears to be a revived market for contemporary art.

“It’s been outstanding,” said Leigh Conner of Washington, D.C., gallery Conner Contemporary, standing in the orange glow of a new digital light sculpture by Leo Villareal that had just sold to an American collector for $75,000. She added that in the fair’s first day and a half she had been reconnecting with clients from Europe that she hadn’t seen in more than a year.

Collectors like Toby Devan Lewis and Susan and Michael Hort were on hand for the opening preview, as were museum directors including Louis Gracchos of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and Sherri Geldin of the Wexner Arts Center in Columbus, Ohio. Wexner trustee Ron Pizzuti dropped by the stand of Los Angeles gallery Angles and picked up a new painting by young L.A. artist Annie Lapin, for $8,200.

Both institutions and private collectors were opening their wallets. The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought Portrait (Hals) (2009), a digital C-print by Jason Salavon, for $5,500 at another L.A. gallery, Mark Moore; Salavon’s nearly abstract piece is a composite image made by layering photographs of paintings by Dutch master Frans Hals. An unnamed Art Institute of Chicago board member got a large painting by Terry Rodgers from Amsterdam’s Torch gallery, for $80,000. And, for around $30,000, an unnamed Midwest museum bought a room-sized installation by Teresa Diehl made from hundreds of hanging, fist-sized airplanes carved from soap, from Frankfurt dealer Anita Beckers.

Like Conner, Beckers attested to the geographical diversity of collectors at the fair, saying that while she’d been seeing mostly Americans and South Americans, she’d also sold to Europeans. She sold four photographs documenting a performance by Bogota-born artist Maria Jose Arjona, all to the same collector, for $12,000. (Arjona was on hand at Pulse doing daily performances; the one this reporter witnessed involved her standing patiently atop four large blocks of ice, melting them with her bare feet.)

Other early sales at the fair included a series of illuminated sculptures in the shape of books by Korean artist Airan Kang at the New York gallery Bryce Wolkowitz, which specializes in digital and new media art. All 50 of the individual books sold at $4,500 apiece, as did a larger composite piece, for $45,000, to a Miami-based collector.

For many of the galleries here, it was risky to sign up for a fair in Miami in the depths of a recession. But on the whole they were glad they made the trip. New York dealer Ed Winkleman, who’d parted with a new video by Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation, among other works, characterized his experience at Pulse as “a thousand times better than last year,” adding that he was happy not to be sitting in his New York gallery. “You had to make a decision six or eight months ago as to whether or not you would be coming here,” he says. “It was a matter of nerve, and faith.”

“It’s not 2006, the fish-in-a-barrel year when you sold out your booth in three hours,” continued Winkleman, a keen market observer who recently published a book about how to open and run a contemporary art gallery. “But it’s better than 2008. People have been telling me it feels like 2004.”

Sarah Douglas is staff writer for Art+Auction, Modern Painters, and ARTINFO.