Atlanta Art Park
Permanent Installations

SIGHTLESS AMONG MIRACLES
a bronze sculpture created by R.T. Wallen
located in the gardens near the Upper Lake of The Carter Center

R. T. Wallen is an internationally recognized sculptor and printmaker from Juneau, Alaska.  He is best known for his stone lithographs of Alaska wildlife and native people.  In 1988, he completed his first monumental sculpture in bronze, a commission from the city of Juneau to commemorate the first 25 years of Alaska Statehood. 

Wallen’s work has been given as state gifts or gifts from private collectors to a U.S. President, and to royalty and heads of state abroad. His work is found in museum collections both in the United States and in many other countries, including the royal/national museums of Denmark, Germany, and Jordan. His work has been exhibited in Europe and in Asia.

In 1993, he volunteered his time to the River Blindness Foundation to produce an edition of small bronze sculptures entitled Sightless Among Miracles. 

The bronze is a study of a young boy leading his father—sadly a typical scene in many African nations plagued by onchocerciasis, a debilitating disease robbing people not only of their sight but often their livelihood.  Commonly known as river blindness, the disease is transmitted by the bites of small black flies that breed in rapidly flowing streams and rivers. Approximately 18 million people in 37 countries in Africa and the Americas are infected with river blindness; 500,000 are visually impaired; and another 270,000 are blind due to the disease.  Fortunately, a single annual treatment with the medicine Mectizan®, donated by Merck & Co. Inc., can prevent this debilitating disease. The Carter Center is one of the only nongovernmental organizations working to distribute this medicine and conduct health education in both Africa and the Americas—being active in the struggle to control onchocerciasis in five of 30 endemic African countries and leading the movement to eliminate the disease from all six endemic countries in the Americas.

Thanks to a global partnership between The Carter Center, other international nongovernmental organizations, and participating endemic countries, this once commonplace scene of blind adults being led from place to place by children is progressively becoming a thing of the past.  A larger-than-life bronze sculpture of the Sightless Among Miracles figures was commissioned by Merck & Co., for their world headquarters in New Jersey in 1995.  A second casting, donated by John and Rebecca Moores was dedicated by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, at The Carter Center in Atlanta in 1996. Four other castings of the life-size statue are located around the world at headquarters for the World Bank, Lions Clubs International, the World Health Organization, and the Royal Tropical Institute in the Netherlands.