The Age of Black Metal by Afrotectopia

George Segal Gallery and Kasser Theater Lobby
September 23 – December 14, 2025

Black Metal originated as a kitchen table art book that pushes the boundaries of space travel, science fiction, speculative design, Black culture, art, technology, and spirituality. The book emerged from an Afrotectopia-led incubator, in collaboration with MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative and NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. The project features contributions from artists Jordan Caldwell, Kordae Jatafa Henry, Jeremy Kamal, and Ari Melenciano.

The Age of Black Metal builds upon the foundational ideas of the book and translates the text into a fully immersive experience for visitors to explore each conceptual chapter–from metaphysical training manuals, botanical consciousness, and self-alignment protocols–through participatory installations. The exhibition is set centuries in the future, imagining a timeline where society has been profoundly shaped by the principles of Black Metal. Ultimately, visitors will not only bear witness to the societal effects of Black Metal, but also leave transformed in some way.

The Age of Black Metal invites all to imagine the futures that Black culture can build, if given space to expand without limit.

The exhibition is curated by Afrotectopia founder Ari Melenciano, who provided exhibition conceptualization, spatial design, and translated the original chapters of Black Metal into experiential installations.

Schedule A Group Visit

Admission to exhibitions and programs is free and open to the public.

We believe in making our events accessible and inclusive for everyone in our community. If you require accommodations or have questions about accessibility, please don’t hesitate to contact the University Galleries at galleries@montclair.edu or 973-655-3382, preferably two weeks prior to the event date. We want to ensure that every participant attending our programs can engage fully without barriers or limitations.

CAPS Recharge Week Event: DIY Journal & Mini Vision Board

Segal Gallery
Monday, December 8
12:30 – 1:30 pm
Recharge with Counseling and Psychological Services and the University Galleries staff during a cozy crafting session to help you de-stress and unwind before finals. Join us to create and decorate your own DIY journal and 2026 vision board. All supplies provided — just bring yourself and a friend!

Visitors celebrated the opening of the exhibition and met curator Ari Melenciano at the reception of The Age of Black Metal by Afrotectopia.

Art Forum

Art Forum is a speaker series featuring artists, designers, art historians, curators, and art critics from around the world presenting their work and ideas in an open forum, hosted by the Department of Art & Design. Curator Ari Melenciano discussed her latest work in the exhibition The Age of Black Metal.

Exploring Within: A Journey of Empowerment & Liberation

The University Galleries partnered with Counseling and Psychological Services and the Office for Inclusive Excellence to host the opening event of Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 at Montclair! Attendees joined us for a journey of mindful self-exploration, featuring the interactive exhibitionThe Age of Black Metal by Afrotectopia.

Panel Discussion

This panel featured Afrotectopia founder Ari Melenciano and speakers from the African American Caucus, Disability Caucus, and Asian Pacific Islander Caucus in a cross-community dialogue about shared advocacy and connected futures in the context of Black Metal. Moderated by the Office for Inclusive Excellence.

Black Metal Film Screening and Discussion

This special screening of the film adaptation of Black Metal was followed by a conversation with curator Ari Melenciano and Black African Cinema film theorist Afi Venessa Appiah. Attendees received a limited edition chapbook with a film essay by Appiah.

WMSC Unplugged: A Live Performance by Malachi Nassér

WMSC Unplugged was excited to be back in the Segal Gallery with a special live performance by Rostafa, a Singer-Guitarist whose presence puts you both at ease and with great anticipation of what will happen next. His repertoire consists of songs from the 50’s to the present time in music. Genres include Rock, Blues, Country, Folk, Reggae, R&B, Jazz-Blues, Soul, & Americana. Artists include but not limited to Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Everly Bros, CSNY, Lenny Kravitz, Prince, Billy Joel, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, & much more. Rostafa is a graduate of Montclair State University.

De-Stress and Gratitude Craft Session

Hosted before Thanksgiving break, Counseling and Psychological Services and the University Galleries staff hosted a cozy, creative afternoon focused on gratitude through crafting. Participants enjoyed hands-on crafts, relaxing music, and a chance to pause and reflect on what they’re thankful for this season.

Explore our free digital guide on Bloomberg Connects, the free arts and culture app created by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The guide is available on the web or via the app and can be accessed for both onsite and offsite visits. Hear insights from the curator and artist, and explore responses from students, faculty, and community members through audio, photo and video features.

Ari Melenciano is an artist, designer, and systems thinker. Through her practice, she explores how computation and designed perception can be used to nurture new frameworks for understanding the world.She has taught courses in new media technologies, design, critical theory, and culture across NYU, the Pratt Institute, Hunter College, Parsons School of Design, and Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, and the Museum of the Future in Dubai. And, she is the founder of Afrotectopia, a pioneering social institution that builds communities at the nexus of culture, art, design, and technology. It has taken the form of festivals, think tanks, a multi-university incubator, an international fellowship, and an experimental art book. Previously, she worked as a creative technologist at Google’s Creative Lab, where she contributed to projects ranging from machine learning on fingertip-scale hardware to creative direction for the Google for Africa campaign, and generative AI research strategy.
Jeremy Kamal is an artist combining film, video games, music, and landscape architecture into a single expanded fictional universe. Using contemporary media, such as computer-generated animation and video games, Kamal creates digital sci-fi environments that challenge traditional ideas of culture and ecology. His work features a growing cast of interconnected landscapes that host atmospheric imagery, emotive characters, and unique narratives that frontier new geomythologies.Jeremy is an Onassis ONX fellow and was previously an artist resident at the Sundance Institute, NYU ITP, Folly Tree Arboretum, and Black Public Media. As a freelance 3D generalist, he has collaborated on projects for Marine Serre, The North Face, Gucci, Trippie Redd, Yo Gotti, Sa Babi, and Lil Miquela. He is a design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard GSD and a Master of Arts from SCI-Arc’s Fiction and Entertainment program.

As a filmmaker and visual artist, Kordae Jatafa Henry’s (also known as Tafa) practices ruminate in the invisible, lost, invented, forgotten, coded, and bounded layers of who we are into new worlds. His most recent work explores the ontological themes of raw materials, mysticism, landscapes, movement performance, race, gender and emergent technologies through the power of ceremony and ritual. As a non-binary approach, Kordae’s work reconstructs past, present, and future narratives driven by pop-culture, and Black speculative fiction.Where flesh meets animation, performance meets the virtual, Kordae’s work instills a techno-ontological study of Blackness in the 21st century. This re-imagining of cinema is an emergence of a new ideology for storytelling that refuses to sit still. His CGI works evoke an embodied viscerality that Pixar has yet to exhibit into motion pictures. Stemming from his own Jamaican-British roots he finds himself returning to artforms such as movement, mythology, and folklore but in the digital, that utilizes intonation and music to deliver rhythmic accentuation and dramatic stylization of worlds that feel.Through live-action music films, installations, dance, anthropomorphization, game engine environments, and mythology, Kordae’s work invites new ways of seeing humans, folklore, mysticism, pop-culture, post-genre music, labor, and creation stories as tools to explore the radical imagination. Currently, Kordae is directing music films, teaching at SCI-Arc and a fellow at NEW INC/ONX. Within his fellowship he is working on a coming of age interstellar short film entitled IF NOT NOW about how civilizations began.
Jordan Caldwell is a projector blending art, language and technology within community. Her practice materializes as new media exhibitions and cooperative spaces for interdisciplinary studies. Her current focus is cultivating residency programs in land-oriented locations, while centering intrapersonal growth as essential to creative development.

The Age of Black Metal by Afrotectopia