Amy and Wendy Yao’s 2006 Art Swapmeet

“…What is a swap meet?”

East Coasters and others always ask us… It’s essentially a flea market. This question underscores the locality of the words, pointing out that they are specific to the West Coast. Swap meets are everywhere in the West Coast and some, like the Slauson Swap Meet, have been made famous in West Coast rap.

We grew up going to swap meets nearly every weekend, tagging along with our grandparents at the break of dawn and riding illegally amongst the boxes in the back of their customized white Toyota minivan. Our grandparents worked at the swap meet every weekend for years, selling videotape rewinders and novelty erasers imported from Taiwan. We would help out and watch all the strange characters pass through, everyone buying or selling something. These are some of our earliest memories: the improvised look of each booth, everything on the go. If we were good, at the end of each day our grandparents would let us buy one thing from the used book vendor next door. We would get things like old paperback books published by Mad Magazine, full of jokes and innuendo that we were still too young to fully understand.

The Art Swap Meet has always been an experiment in how an ephemeral, mobile marketplace works within the desert, an environment of extremes where only the fit survive. It provides a chance for its participants to test ideas, make artist direct sales, create works and experiences that might not be salable, or embrace the absurdity of setting up shop in a location where your customer may or may not show up. In all, it’s a beautiful spectacle where trading posts sprout up at sunrise and then evaporate like mirages…

—Wendy and Amy Yao