The Hearts That Left Their Purple - Eva Bouzard-Hui, C. 1996

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Why This Work Matters

Part of Bouzard-Hui’s Sealed Art series, The Hearts that Left Their Purple turns opening the artwork … Read more Why This Work Matters

Part of Bouzard-Hui’s Sealed Art series, The Hearts that Left Their Purple turns opening the artwork into an act of discovery, revealing floating hearts and a private, greeting-card-like inscription. Its strange poetry transforms lost color into emotional release, capturing the bittersweet moment when letting go becomes its own form of freedom.


Artwork Description

The Hearts that Left Their Purple
Eva Bouzard-Hui, c. 1996

Eva Bouzard-Hui organizes The Hearts that Left Their Purple around a pronounced tension between density and ascent. The lower and central portions of the composition are saturated with violet pigment, looping lines, blurred washes, and a dark horizontal mass. Above them, heart-shaped forms rise on slender, curving extensions that resemble balloon strings. The image therefore moves vertically from congestion toward openness, turning the page into a field of emotional release.

The hearts are especially important because they are not static romantic symbols. Their elongated attachments make them read as balloons already beginning to lift. Several tilt in different directions, giving the impression that they are responding to invisible air currents. Bouzard-Hui varies their degree of saturation: some are edged in deep purple, while their interiors remain pale or empty. This visual depletion makes the title literal. The hearts seem to have “left their purple,” shedding color as they ascend.

Purple carries several possible associations within the work. It can suggest passion, mourning, bruising, royalty, spirituality, or transformation. Bouzard-Hui does not restrict the color to one meaning. Instead, she allows it to move between bodily and metaphysical registers. The thickened violet areas below feel bruised, weighted, and physical, while the lighter heart forms above suggest the possibility of spiritual or emotional release.

That ambiguity is consistent with her broader body of work. In pieces such as Pain, Lifeless Love, and A Doubtful Spring, human figures, animals, flowers, and emotionally charged titles interact within unstable pictorial spaces. Her subjects are rarely presented as straightforward illustrations. Instead, they become visual carriers for internal states. A bird may embody hesitant renewal, flowers may retain the outward signs of affection after intimacy has faded, and here the heart becomes a balloon-like object capable of leaving its former emotional atmosphere.

The work’s status as part of Bouzard-Hui’s Sealed Art series adds another dimension. Originally created with the intention of not being opened, Bouzard-Hui seemed to anticipate human curiosity. Before being opened, the piece existed as a closed object whose interior remained withheld. The viewer had to break or undo the seal to encounter the image and inscription. This makes revelation part of the work’s meaning. The act of opening parallels the hearts’ departure: something contained is released into visibility.

Once opened, the format resembles an intimate greeting card, but the message is neither simple nor conventionally sentimental. Bouzard-Hui wrote:

“Bravo! Now brave yet the purple left taking off its heart to ever float.”

The first word, “Bravo,” is emphatically celebratory. It addresses the heart—or perhaps the person represented by it—as though departure were an accomplishment deserving applause. “Now brave” suggests that courage is not necessarily present before the act; bravery may be produced through leaving.

The phrase “yet the purple left” complicates that triumph. Something has departed, faded, or been surrendered. Purple may stand for sorrow, wounded love, emotional heaviness, or the intensity of a previous self. The poem does not say that the heart simply rises. It must first separate from the purple that defined or burdened it.

“Taking off its heart” is the poem’s most paradoxical phrase as it suggests the purple and heart are two distinct things that can separate. To take off can mean to remove, depart, or begin flight. The heart seems simultaneously to remove itself and become airborne. Bouzard-Hui turns emotional detachment into a literal mechanism of ascent. The heart floats because it has been taken off—perhaps from a body, a relationship, or an identity—but the freedom gained remains inseparable from the loss required.

The final phrase, “to ever float,” extends the action indefinitely. It does not promise arrival, only continued suspension. Floating can signify freedom, but also rootlessness and uncertainty. The heart is no longer trapped within the dense purple field, yet it may never settle again.

The poem’s fractured grammar reinforces this instability. It reads as though emotion arrives faster than syntax can organize it. Words function through association rather than conventional sentence structure: bravery, purple, departure, heart, and floating overlap just as the lines and washes overlap in the image. Bouzard-Hui’s language does not explain the work so much as echo its movement.

Together, the sealed format, rising heart-balloons, dissolving purple, and interior poem make the piece a meditation on emotional transformation. The Hearts that Left Their Purple celebrates release without denying its cost. The heart becomes lighter only by abandoning part of what once gave it color.

-Jonathan Flike

About the Artist
Eva Bouzard-Hui (1936–2023) was an American artist, ceramicist, poet, educator, and community advocate whose career spanned more than six decades. Working across painting, drawing, ceramics, collage, photography, handmade paper, book arts, and poetry, she developed an intimate visual language centered on relationships, memory, vulnerability, spirituality, and emotional transformation.

Born in Columbia, South Carolina, and raised in the small town of North, Bouzard-Hui earned a B.A. in Art Education from the University of South Carolina in 1957. She later moved to New York, receiving an M.A. in Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1961 and an Ed.D. in College Teaching from its Arts and Art Education Department in 1993. Her continuing studies included ceramics at Greenwich House Pottery, book arts in New York, Chinese brush painting, and traditional Chinese mounting.

In 1961, Bouzard-Hui began a more than thirty-year career in the Caldwell–West Caldwell public schools of New Jersey. She taught at the middle- and high-school levels and eventually chaired the Art Department and ceramics program at James Caldwell High School. She also held teaching appointments at Middlesex County College, Essex County College, Teachers College, and Georgian Court College. For Bouzard-Hui, education was not separate from studio practice; teaching, experimentation, and encouraging others to discover their own creative language remained central to her life.

Bouzard-Hui met and later married the Chinese-born American ceramicist Ka Kwong Hui, whose work and knowledge of Chinese ceramic traditions contributed to their shared artistic environment. Her own engagement with China expanded through a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation grant to study at the ceramic factories of Jingdezhen. She later lectured and demonstrated at schools and ceramic institutions in China and Hong Kong while also exhibiting as a visiting artist.

Her exhibition career began with a solo presentation at Columbia University in 1961 and continued into the 2010s. Her work was shown at the New Jersey State Museum, Teachers College, the Paterson Museum, Georgian Court College, Phoenix Gallery and the Interchurch Center in New York, Agora Gallery, Studio Montclair, and numerous regional galleries and cultural institutions. Works by Bouzard-Hui are documented in institutional, educational, presidential, and private collections.

Although ceramics remained foundational to her practice, Bouzard-Hui resisted identification with a single medium. Her works on paper combine ink, watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, collage, handmade paper, and handwritten language. Figures, hearts, animals, flowers, vessels, chairs, and domestic objects frequently become carriers of emotion. Titles and inscriptions function as extensions of the imagery, transforming individual works into visual poems, questions, private jokes, prayers, or fragments of correspondence.

This relationship between art and communication is especially evident in her artist-designated “Sealed Art” series. These works were enclosed, folded, wrapped, or sealed so that opening them became part of the artistic experience. The revealed image and handwritten message often resemble a personal greeting card, turning the artwork into an exchange between artist and recipient.

Bouzard-Hui also used art as a form of service. She taught through CARE in Biafra, facilitated race-relations programs, worked with shelter residents, led poetry groups at the Essex County Jail Annex, and provided art instruction to incarcerated individuals at East Jersey State Prison. Her career reflects a sustained belief that creative work could provide dignity, connection, humor, and emotional freedom.

Across her many media, Bouzard-Hui treated the handmade object as a vessel for human experience. Her work asks how tenderness and imagination might endure pain, separation, and uncertainty—and how an artwork might carry those feelings from one person to another.

Underrepresented Artist Information
Despite a career spanning more than six decades, Eva Bouzard-Hui remains largely absent from broader accounts of postwar American art. Her relative obscurity does not reflect a lack of training, exhibition history, or sustained artistic production. Rather, it illustrates how artists working outside dominant commercial centers—and especially women whose careers combined studio practice, teaching, craft, and community service—have often been overlooked by the market and art-historical record.

Bouzard-Hui worked across ceramics, painting, drawing, collage, photography, poetry, handmade paper, and book arts. This movement between media enriched her practice but also placed her outside the easily defined categories through which artists are frequently promoted and collected. Ceramics and art education, both central to her career, have historically received less institutional attention than painting and sculpture produced for the commercial gallery system. Her extensive work in schools, shelters, prisons, and community programs further positioned art as a social and educational practice rather than solely as a market commodity.

Although Bouzard-Hui exhibited regularly in New York, New Jersey, and institutional settings, much of her career developed through cooperative galleries, colleges, libraries, community organizations, and regional cultural networks. These venues allowed her to maintain an independent and experimental practice, but they rarely produced the sustained critical documentation or secondary-market visibility that establishes long-term recognition.

Her surviving work reveals an artist of remarkable emotional and material range. Bouzard-Hui addressed love, grief, faith, confinement, humor, memory, and human connection through imagery that could be whimsical, unsettling, tender, or deeply introspective. Her intimate works on paper and artist-designated “Sealed Art” also challenge conventional assumptions about artistic importance by locating meaning in small scale, handwritten language, private exchange, and personal discovery.

Recovering Bouzard-Hui’s work contributes to a broader reassessment of women artists, artist-educators, ceramicists, and regionally active creators whose achievements have remained fragmented across archives, private collections, and personal histories. Her practice demonstrates that significance is not determined solely by market recognition, but by the originality, persistence, and humanity of the work itself. See less