Richard Ellis on Zsófia Bán

This essay is a response to Ban’s contribution in Global Perspectives on the United States. Ellis asks how often it is that large, highly visible, and public monumental art is also strangely invisible as well, and notes that “Little Warsaw” (András Gálik and Bálint Havas) appearing in the Ban article makes such complexity especially central. Very appreciative of what Zsofia Ban writes in her essay, Ellis notes that the further one delves into a complex representation of “legend, social space, and locality” the more elusive the meanings become. In Ban’s case, it is especially interesting to see how a sculpture is talked about as mainstream in Hungarian representational art, by people both on the right and on the left, when it was not and had not been. “Little Warsaw” then offers American Studies a reminder of how capacious it must be in what falls within its turf, while never forgetting the complexities of imperialistic appropriation.