From exile to expression: MFA student turns family history into fine art degree

May 21, 2025

Elise Aleman, a Georgia Southern University Master of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate, spent much of her adult life in South Florida working as a graphic artist. She moved to Savannah, Georgia, in 2017 to pursue a new calling in painting. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design, Aleman decided she wasn’t done yet.

Aleman dreamed of becoming an art teacher, and she wanted to have a graduate degree to boost her applications. While looking for a master’s program, she was recruited by a friend to look at Georgia Southern. Shortly thereafter, she became a member of Eagle Nation.

As she developed her portfolio in the graduate program, she found herself going to a familiar source.

In the 1960s, there was a wave of immigration from Cuba into the U.S. This pattern of immigration was called the “Freedom Flights.”

When she was just seven years old, Aleman and most of her family were on one of those planes in July of 1967. 

The Communist regime believed all who left the island were deserting their nation, and they took many of the families’ belongings in retaliation. 

“When people would get on the flights, the military was at the airport,” she said. “They would go through all your bags, they take anything  that either they wanted to keep for themselves or just to be spiteful. A lot of the time, they would take photographs and just throw them out.”

To avoid losing their family pictures, Aleman’s mother left their photos with relatives in Cuba.

After landing in the U.S., they settled in a small community in New Jersey where they learned a new language and way of life.

Over time, deliveries began arriving in their new home in the Garden State. They held the family photos they had left behind, sent by relatives who had been protecting them.

“I use the photographs from Cuba that were sent to us when we came in,” she said. “There’s a series in my scope that I did that is about those photographs and immigrating here. I wanted to make people see them and really connect with it in their own way.”

Those paintings were featured in a recent art exhibition, “Theopoetics Prothesis,” on the University’s Armstrong Campus in Savannah, which explored the intersections of her faith, exile and transformation through two parallel yet interwoven bodies of work. One aspect reflected on her family’s immigration from Cuba, and considered how cultural displacement shapes identity, memory and faith. The other engaged directly with biblical themes, using scripture as a foundation for conceptual exploration.

“My goal was to make both scripture and personal history compelling and relevant,” she said. “The Bible is more than just a religious text—it’s a multidimensional tapestry of history, poetry, prophecy and metaphor. Likewise, the story of exile and displacement is not just my own but a universal narrative of survival, adaptation and faith. I wanted viewers to engage with these layered meanings, finding connections between the sacred, the personal and the collective.”

As Aleman prepares to graduate this week, she’s reflecting on the journey her family took to make it possible. She’s also grateful to the Georgia Southern community for welcoming her, despite the age gap between her and other MFA students.

“Those students, especially in the grad program, they just embrace you,” she said. “I never felt like an outsider. ‘Oh, there’s the old lady,’ you know? We have a very tight group in the fine arts program.”