“First Name Only” A Solo Exhibition by Jona Monét

Coming Soon

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?


Artist Bio

I create to reclaim. Each piece I make is a layered act of remembering, naming, and becoming. My work is rooted in the spiritual technologies of my Gullah-Geechee, Seminole, and Cherokee ancestry, drawing from family histories of labor, land, grief, and survival. Raised between Southern fields and digital screens, I understand both root and code.

Through mixed media, sacred geometry, performance, and photography, I build visual rituals that blur the boundary between archive and altar. I’m interested in the thresholds: between the physical and spiritual, between the swamp and the throne, between what was taken and what remains.

I paint because the body remembers. I design because the story deserves form. And I create because I was never meant to be forgotten.