First Name Only is a visual origin story - ancestral, autobiographical, and sovereign. This exhibition navigates the space between memory and myth, mapping the artist’s journey through lineage, grief, and reclamation.

Drawing from her Gullah-Geechee, Seminole, and Cherokee roots, Jona Monét uses photography, painting, ritual, and sacred geometry to build a language of visual testimony. The exhibition’s title is a meditation on names - not as labels assigned by history, but as inheritances that precede it. A quiet refusal of imposed identity, a mirror held to selfhood before history reframed us.

This work does not seek approval or explanation. It offers presence. It invites remembrance. And it asks, simply:

Who were you before the world told you who to be?