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Why This Work Matters Wishbone Luck multiplies the familiar wishbone into a field of branching forms, turning a simple superstition into a meditation on chance, choice, and uncertain outcomes. Bouzard-Hui’s recurring fascination with luck gives the work added resonance: every wish carries both hope and the possibility of disappointment.
Wishbone Luck Eva Bouzard-Hui constructs Wishbone Luck through extreme visual economy. The composition is almost entirely monochromatic, consisting of broad black-brown ink forms placed against a generous field of unpainted paper. A few isolated marks establish the eyes, brows, nose, lips, jaw, and neck, while heavier passages define the sides of the head. As in So What!, Bouzard-Hui allows the blank ground to participate actively in the portrait. The face is not filled in; it is assembled through interruptions, absences, and the viewer’s instinct to connect incomplete information. The most important formal device is the recurring forked shape. Along the right side of the face, a thick vertical contour rises upward and divides near the top, clearly evoking the familiar Y-shaped structure of a wishbone. A smaller fork appears nearer the center of the forehead, where two dark lines separate and rejoin around the brow and bridge of the nose. Even the lower facial marks like the curved mouth, angular chin, and paired eye forms repeat variations on division, branching, and choice. These wishbone-like forms do more than illustrate the title. They become the architecture of the face. Luck is not represented by an object held outside the body; it appears embedded within the figure’s identity. The portrait seems built around a system of forks, as though the person’s emotional state has been shaped by uncertain choices and competing outcomes. The right contour is especially forceful. It extends from the jaw to well above the head, creating a dark, protective boundary. Yet because it splits at the top, the line also suggests a path dividing into two possibilities. The figure is visually positioned at the point where a single direction becomes multiple routes. This gives the portrait a quiet psychological tension: the person appears caught between alternatives without knowing which will prove fortunate. The left side of the head is treated differently. A heavy black mass curves downward from the upper left, suggesting hair, shadow, or another protective enclosure. It stops abruptly before meeting the jaw, leaving a small opening along the cheek. This asymmetry prevents the face from feeling fully contained. One side is sealed by the wishbone-like vertical, while the other is only partially enclosed. Bouzard-Hui balances shelter with vulnerability. The eyes are lowered and reduced to narrow, separated marks. Their orientation suggests reflection, resignation, prayer, or private wishing. The figure does not look outward toward the viewer or toward any visible source of fortune. Instead, attention turns inward. Luck becomes a mental and emotional preoccupation rather than an external event. The mouth is similarly restrained. It is formed from a few broken curves that do not resolve into a smile or frown. This ambiguity is important because it resists the celebratory associations ordinarily attached to “luck.” The figure has not yet received confirmation of a favorable outcome. The title identifies the subject as luck, but the expression remains suspended between hope and doubt. The wishbone itself carries contradictory associations. It is a symbol of optimism, ritual, and childhood hope, but the ritual depends upon tension and breakage. Two people pull in opposite directions, and only one receives the piece believed to grant the wish. Good fortune is therefore tied to competition, separation, and unequal outcomes. Bouzard-Hui’s forked lines preserve this darker underside. The symbol of luck also becomes a symbol of division. That division may be reflected in the face. The central vertical line nearly splits the portrait, creating the impression of two adjoining halves. The left side is softer and more open, while the right side is bounded by a rigid dark arc. The figure can be read as psychologically divided between faith and skepticism, desire and resignation, or the wish itself and the fear that it will not be fulfilled. The scalloped paper edge introduces an intimate, handmade quality. It recalls stationery, keepsakes, personal notes, or the private objects on which wishes might be recorded. Bouzard-Hui frequently worked in modest formats that allowed image, title, and emotional utterance to feel closely connected. Rather than presenting a monumental allegory of fate, she offers something closer to a private talisman. The limited palette further concentrates the work’s psychological intensity. Many of Bouzard-Hui’s watercolors use saturated blues, reds, violets, and greens to create atmospheric or symbolic environments. Here, nearly all color has been withheld. Without the emotional cues provided by a varied palette, the viewer must focus on the pressure, thickness, and direction of each mark. The image feels more like an emblem or ink meditation than a descriptive portrait. This stripped-down approach connects Wishbone Luck to works such as So What!, where a simplified face carries a complex attitude through a few emphatic contours. In both, the figure appears inward and emotionally guarded. Yet So What! introduces a flower-like growth that suggests nature or renewal being dismissed, while Wishbone Luck replaces the organic motif with branching forms associated with fate and wishing. One work resists external renewal; the other waits upon uncertain possibility. Luck appears elsewhere in Bouzard-Hui’s broader practice as part of her interest in forces that remain beyond personal control. Her titles frequently identify emotional or existential conditions like pain, doubt, love, shielding, capture, destination, and closure rather than fixed narratives. “Luck” belongs naturally within that vocabulary because it names an outcome people desire but cannot command. This concern with uncertain outcomes also links the work to her bird imagery. Birds in Bouzard-Hui’s paintings may be caught, held, searching for a destination, or poised within doubtful spring landscapes. Their capacity for flight represents possibility, but circumstance continually complicates that freedom. In Wishbone Luck, the same uncertainty is condensed into the human face. Instead of a bird confronting a trap or route, the figure confronts the forked and fickle structure of chance. The work does not reveal whether the wish will be granted. There is no broken bone, victorious gesture, or symbol of fulfilled riches. Bouzard-Hui fixes the portrait at the point before resolution, when hope remains active precisely because certainty is unavailable. Wishbone Luck is less about fortune received than about the emotional condition of wishing. The forked forms offer promise, but they also divide the face and enclose the figure. Luck appears as something simultaneously desired, feared, and built into the person’s way of seeing the world. The solemn expression suggests that the act of hoping carries its own weight, especially when the outcome must be surrendered to chance. |
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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. |
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Provenance* 1998 - 2023: Eva Bouzard-Hui 2023 - 2026: Auctions at Showplace 2026 - Present: Visard Gallery *Provenance and attribution details are based on our best research and are offered in good faith but are not guaranteed. Please contact us through the contact form with any questions prior to purchase. |
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Academic Resources Eva Bouzard-Hui_Maplewood Online |
Wishbone Luck - Eva Bouzard-Hui, c. 1998
$450.00
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