In this text, Puerto Rican artist Elizam Escobar writes a treatise on the relationship between art and freedom. He states that “art is a constant exercise of liberation and freedom, in which a being commits to writing or deliriously recreates his dreams, his actual experience, and his ‘freedom,’ as well as his ties to his era and to his existence.” Escobar establishes a difference between the negative tone attached to the phrase “ser libre de” [to be free from] and the phrase that applies to art, which is “ser libre para” [to be free to]. He adds: “To see art as liberation is to understand freedom as an internal process in its relationship to real limits.”

Elizam Escobar (Ponce, Puerto Rico, born 1948) was arrested on April 4, 1980, accused of being a member of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña [Armed Forces of Puerto Rican National Liberation] (FALN), a clandestine movement on the island that struggled for Puerto Rican independence, and was sentenced to 68 years in prison. During his prison term, Escobar continued to paint; he also wrote poetry and theoretical essays. On September 10, 1999, he was released from the El Reno federal prison in Oklahoma, whereupon he resumed his life in Puerto Rico. Since his release, he has taught painting at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas [School of Visual Arts]. [That same year,] Escobar organized and published the book, Los ensayos del artificiero: más allá de lo político-directo y el postmodernismo [Essays by the Explosives Expert: Beyond Direct Politics and Postmodernism].Between 1968 and 1980, Escobar worked as a draftsman and caricaturist for several newspapers with Marxist leanings, such as El Socialista, El Correo de la Quincena, Desafío, PL Revista, and Libertad.When he wrote this text, Escobar was a prisoner at the Federal Corrrectional Institution in Oxford, Wisconsin. In this exhibition, he showed 65 works painted in prison. These included several series under the titles, Pez [Fish] (1984), Espantahumanos [People-Hater] (1984), Los ciudadanos del país fantasma [Citizens in a Ghost Country] (1985), Mujer [Woman] (1985), La maga y el vejigante [The Sorceress and the Vejigante] (1985), El vejigante moribundo [The Dying Vejigante] (1985).