Visual artist, theorist and poet Elizam Escobar died this morning at the age of 72 after years of battling cancer.
In November 2020, it presented the new edition of the miniature art exhibition, at the Casa de los Contrafuertes cultural center, in Old San Juan
Escobar had overcome a cancer disease diagnosed in 2016 in 2018, after a benign polyp was discovered on his face, which was bleeding. By not treating it, it got water. When he had surgery for the third time, a muscle was removed from his femur and implanted in his forehead. He then said he was recovering and starting treatment every two weeks to prevent another tumor from forming.
“I have improved, but as a side effect of this biologic therapy I have inflammatory arthritis and I need to use an instrument to speak and be understood. But I have the courage and energy to keep working regardless of the health problem, and to continue continue giving fire, ”he said THE SPOKESMAN in 2019, the cartoonist and poet grew up with thorough academic preparation in Puerto Rico and New York.
A member of an underground pro-independence movement in Puerto Rico, he was charged with seditious conspiracy in 1980 and sentenced to 68 years in prison by the US government. He never stopped painting and writing about the theory of art and poetry. He was released in 1999 and returned to the island to exhibit and join the faculty of Puerto Rico’s School of Plastic Arts and Design.
In prison he wrote The Artificer’s Essays: Beyond the Direct-Political and Postmodernism.
Escobar also stood out as a cartoonist and teacher. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Puerto Rico in 1973 and continued his studies at the City University of New York, the Brooklyn Museum and the Art Students League of New York, his biography says in the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, where about twenty individual exhibitions and the same number of group exhibitions are described.
He has also worked as a cartoonist and teacher in several public schools and at the Museo del Barrio School of Art; He was affiliated with the Association of Hispanic Arts in New York.
In his recent painting and mixed media he poses questions about human communication, the phenomenon of the painter as an observer (or not) of reality, and contemporary marginality and isolation.