I Love Liberty (C.192) was produced in 1982 in conjunction with the I Love Liberty television special, organised by People For the American Way — the progressive advocacy organisation founded by Norman Lear in 1981 to promote constitutional freedoms and civic participation. The broadcast, taped on Washington's 250th birthday and aired nationally on March 21, 1982, brought together performers, politicians, and artists to celebrate American democratic values at a moment when those values were under active political contestation. Lichtenstein's contribution was this screenprint on Arches 88 paper, published jointly by the artist and People For the American Way in an edition of 250.

The Statue of Liberty was a gift from one republic to another — a French object that became the defining American symbol, its meaning accumulating through decades of mass reproduction across posters, stamps, coins, and popular illustration. By 1982 it was as thoroughly a product of printed culture as the comic-book panels that had made Lichtenstein's reputation, and he treated it accordingly — close, cropped, enlarged to a scale that stripped away any sense of the monument's civic setting and reduced it to its essential marks: bold outline, diagonal hatching, the yellow of the crown and torch against white and black.

The statue's recognisability survived every formal operation Lichtenstein applied to it because the symbol had long since detached itself from the object — living in reproduction, in the printed mark, in the boldly outlined image circulated across every medium of American public life — and I Love Liberty (C.192) acknowledged that condition directly, treating the most loaded symbol in American culture with the same even attention he had always brought to comic books, fighter jets, and architectural ornament. It remains among the most sought-after and widely recognised prints of his career, the subject and the method arriving at a point of complete alignment.

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