Treasure trove of photographs of NYC artist protests 1969-1972 by photographer Jan Van Raay on her flickr stream and website.

I got here this morning by researching the arrest and trial of Jean Toche, founding member of the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), who in March 1974 mailed flyers to museums and galleries in NYC criticizing their bourgeois and exclusive exhibition policies and also to show support for Tony Shafrazi’s action in February 1974 of spray painting “KILL ALL LIES” on Picasso’s Guernica at the MoMA in protest of the Vietnam War. He was ostensibly arrested for a portion of the flyer that called for the “kidnapping of: museum’s trustees, museum’s directors, museum’s creators, museum’s benefactors, to be held as war hostages until a People’s Court is convened, to deal specifically with the cultural crimes of the ruling class, and with decision of sanctions, reparation and restitution, in whatever form decided by the People and the Artists.” Charges against Toche were dropped following a psychiatric evaluation, but the event resounded across the art world.

Documents from the Toche event as well as from the Argentinian Collective Rosario’sTucumán arde (1968) and Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. (1971), both of which were censored at the time of their exhibition, were exhibited as models of practice and evidence of state control in the first exhibition organized by Bernard Teyssedre and dedicated to Sociological Art in Paris in December 1974. This subsequent exhibition organized by artists reactivates the critique of the original projects while mounting a critique against the projects’ censorship.