BEVERLY AARONS WRITES THE FUTURE THAT REFUSES TO BE ERASED

by Marcus Harrison-Green

Should anyone be tasked with writing the story of our future, let it be Beverly Aarons. Her words descend into the deep places where memory was buried, holding up a light to insist that we look. She writes in the margins where the world tried to erase us, making of those erasures a testament that survival is not an accident, but inheritance. Her sentences do not politely request remembrance; they demand it. They compel us to reckon with the past, wrestle with the present, and imagine a future commensurate with the weight of all we have endured.

Beverly arrived at storytelling like a kid who already knew the route and sprinted anyway. “I was always a storyteller,” she told me, recalling how she spun elaborate but convincing tales as a child of meeting Michael Jackson or hanging out with Different Strokes actor Gary Coleman. The instinct hardened into craft early: an apprenticeship at Chicago’s legendary Defender at fourteen, summers as a Shakespearean actor, debate club’s tightrope between logic and theater. The medium was never the point. The charge was: hold an audience long enough to change what they thought they knew.

"If Nikole Hannah-Jones teaches us to dig until we hit bedrock, and Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us to breathe deep enough to feel the weight of history in our lungs, then Aarons is the one who builds on that ground: an entire house with walls of memory, floors of imagination, and windows flung wide so the future can walk right in."

That charge, part reporter’s ethic, part artist’s obligation, frames why Beverly refuses the lazy binary between past and present. History, as she tells it, did not tap her shoulder; it seized her library card. “I spent a lot of time at the library,” she said of her teenage years in Chicago’s South Side. “I would read books about history. I would read philosophy. From that, I could see what happened in the past and how it helped create what was happening right now.” And because America is expert at forgetting, she learned quickly how amnesia works in practice. After transferring from an all-Black school to a mostly white one, she wrote a report on Toni Morrison, only to be told by her teacher, “She’s not a real author. I’ve never heard of her.” That moment revealed more than the educator’s vacuousness. “If he didn’t know Morrison, it wasn’t just about ignorance. It was about erasure.”

The realization crystallized her project: expose how history is weaponized to make entire peoples invisible. “You couldn’t hold on to white supremacist ideas and be fully rooted in history,” Aarons said. “Learning the past is how you refuse the lie.”

If Nikole Hannah-Jones teaches us to dig until we hit bedrock, and Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us to breathe deep enough to feel the weight of history in our lungs, then Aarons is the one who builds on that ground: an entire house with walls of memory, floors of imagination, and windows flung wide so the future can walk right in. She writes journalism and essays, yes, but she also builds worlds: a 2018 live-action game asking neighbors to imagine an economic future worthy of their grandchildren; Shoreline 2160, a stage play envisioning climate migration; the forthcoming video game Rent Hike, which translates housing precarity into embodied experience. And she runs Artists Up Close, a monthly series profiling painters, dancers, and

writers. Its tagline promises “No celebrity gossip here.”

Her accolades include fellowships from 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, but her truest achievements are harder to list: artists seen, communities challenged to imagine, readers invited to think alongside her.

What sets Aarons apart is the attention underpinning her work. She treats culture as a living system and criticism as translation between realms, art, history, science, ecology, without flattening any of them. “Writing is thinking,” she says. “Reading is also thinking.” A good critic, in her view, “can break open meaning and make connections to other realms. Those realms could be history, contemporary events, science, nature.” She calls herself “a non-linear seeker,” following threads across time and discipline until the pattern reveals itself.

Her admiration for ARTE NOIR is evident in every piece she’s written for it. She loves that the space refuses to file Black art under a single safe label. “ARTE NOIR is focusing on artists in the African diaspora...but giving them no limits,” she said. “The artists can show up as their full selves.” That freedom extends to her assignment: “Vivian has entrusted me to look and see and to truly analyze that work without any filters.”

She does not write to translate Black artists for a presumed white audience. “I’m talking to the people who are interested in that work, to that community, to the artist, to myself. If other people want to join that conversation, they can, but I’m not trying to translate the work for people who are at the periphery. Some things are not translatable...there’s nothing like the original.”

This is not gatekeeping, but accuracy. Beverly knows what gets lost when language bends to someone else’s comfort. In a recent exhibition, she describes a photograph of a figure bowed in reverence before an enormous Afro. No wall label was needed: “It instantly transmits...this hair, this form, is significant, to be respected, to be loved, to be honored.” Visual art, she argues, allows Black people “to create an ontological framework—meaning, understanding, identity—in symbolic forms” that bypass propaganda. Criticism is the second gift: it makes visible what a casual glance might miss and creates a record “inside the minds of every person who reads it.”

That word, record, keeps surfacing. In an era when memory is fragmented, when exhibitions slip past a city’s attention in the torrent of content, Aarons insists on a paper trail. Her profiles for Artists Up Close, the South Seattle Emerald, and Town Hall Seattle function as both analysis and evidence that a community insisted on its own depth. “Imagine if that was replicated,” she says. “Hundreds of people doing this kind of work at this level...not just about the most famous artists.”

She is frank about the scarcity she writes against. “We’re not getting a lot of quality arts writing," she said. Too much of what exists is surface-level, or reduces Black artists, “to only the racial aspects of who they are,” ignoring the full range of ideas they are wrestling with. Her corrective is to enter conversations, not to pin them to a thesis. “A lot of times the artist is creating from feeling, from the unspoken knowing...and they can’t articulate what it means,” she said. “A writer can offer at least one perspective. The artist can look and say, ‘Yes, exactly’—or ‘Actually, that’s not what I was thinking.’ Either way, a conversation begins.”

 “A lot of times the artist is creating from feeling, from the unspoken knowing...and they can’t articulate what it means,” she said. “A writer can offer at least one perspective. The artist can look and say, ‘Yes, exactly’—or ‘Actually, that’s not what I was thinking.’ Either way, a conversation begins.”

That conversation is not just local. Beverly imagines someone in Accra or Guyana, ten years from now, reading about an ARTE NOIR exhibition and encountering the work in translation that honors its complexity. Her imagined audience is transnational, diaspora-literate, fluent in the codes without apology.

If this sounds grand, spend a morning in Aarons’s archive. Her interview with filmmaker Thérèse Heliczer could have been reduced to voyeurism. Instead, she built a lattice for grace, tracing the history that made the man while refusing to excuse the harm. She does similar work in “Reclaiming Indigeneity,” guiding readers through Puerto Rico’s colonial present by way of artist Jo Cosme’s lens without making the art an illustration for policy. The criticism breathes on its own; the politics are in the breath.

When I ask what impact she hopes her work with ARTE NOIR and Artists Up Close has had on the city, she answers in concentric circles. First, the artists: “It gives them an opportunity to get something really quality in their hands,” she says—language they can use with funders, curators, audiences, or simply as a mirror. Then the community: a record that insists we were here, making, thinking, arguing. And finally, the broader ecology: a model of depth in a media economy that keeps mistaking speed for rigor.

At ARTE NOIR, she has found a partner that matches her refusal to shrink. “They value depth,” she told me. “They want to offer that to the artist and the space.” The collaboration works because it trusts her method: write directly to the community that recognizes itself in the work, resist flattening, and honor the maker and the making.

Beverly Aarons does not audition to be “the single author of our future.” She is busier than that, building structures where more of us can write. Her criticism is a commons: the place we gather to look hard, to argue in good faith, to remember what beauty carries, to record our living so no one can say later that we were myths. If we are fortunate, this city will go on making room for work that redeems us, for artists whose labor restores our dignity. And perhaps years from now, when someone thumbs through the record, they will see the moment we refused the comfort of forgetting. They will see the night survival ceased to be a question and became our inheritance. They will see the hour we finally believed our story was worth telling, and worth living, fully.

You can read some of Beverly's past ARTE NOIR exhibit write-ups here and here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marcus Harrison Green is the publisher of Hinton Publishing and the editor-at-large of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with The Stranger. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced firsthand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity, and multidimensionality, with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. An award-winning storyteller, he was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commission’s Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020 and named the inaugural James Baldwin Fellow by the Northwest African American Museum in 2022.