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Alaska artist R.T. "Skip" Wallen was recently the subject of a national Public Broadcasting Service documentary, "Sanibel to Siberia," which will air statewide on 360 North (KTOO TV's Alaska content channel, 18) tonight at 9 p.m. The 30-minute program will air nationally this month.

"Sanibel to Siberia" chronicles the creation of a monumental bronze sculpture by Wallen and the Alaska Siberia Research Center to commemorate Alaska's little-known role in the Lend-Lease Program of World War II. The monument is located in downtown Fairbanks, by the Chena River, and is the largest sculpture in the state of Alaska.

The Alaska-Siberia Research Center, led by Alexander Dolitsky, of Juneau, conceived and funded the Alaska-Siberia World War II Memorial, which portrays an American and a Russian pilot in cold-weather gear. Dolitsky also edited the book "Allies in Wartime: The Alaska-Siberia Airway During World War II," which is for sale at Hearthside Books, Rainy Retreat Books, the University of Alaska Southeast bookstore, the Alaska State Museum and online at www.aksrc.org.

The documentary chronicles the historical background for the Memorial and Alaska's little-known role in the top secret undertaking. It goes on to document the process of creating the bronze sculpture in a studio on Sanibel Island, Fla., where the artist went to work when his Juneau studio proved too small for the production of two 10-foot high aviators and twice life-scale propeller and nosecone of a P-39 Bell Airacobra.

From designing the monument to sculpting the figures, packing and shipping the molds to a foundry in Oregon and casting the bronze at the foundry, the artist's process is shown in the film. The dedication in a park along the Chena River in Fairbanks, attended by dignitaries from five nations, concludes the film.

From 1942 to '45, the United States sent almost 8,000 newly minted warplanes to the Soviet Union after its air force was decimated by the Nazis early in the war. The planes were flown from their points of manufacture around the United States to Great Falls, Mont., many by women pilots of the Women Air Service Pilots.

In Great Falls, the planes were tested, winterized and flown on by men of the U.S. Army 7th Ferrying Group to Fairbanks, where Soviet pilots trained on them and flew them across Bering Strait and Siberia to the war fronts. Brave pilots from both nations faced subzero temperatures in unheated cockpits as they flew across mostly uncharted wilderness in the subarctic regions of North America and Siberia.

Wallen has celebrated Alaska in drawings, paintings and stone lithographs since territorial days. For the Silver Anniversary of Alaska Statehood in 1984, he and his wife, Lynn, donated the bronze sculpture Windfall Fisherman to the city of Juneau. This study of an Alaska brown bear, based on Wallen's field notes and sketches, stands in front of the Capitol and was cited by the Juneau Empire as "the most photographed spot in the capital city."

Wallen also volunteered his time to create a sculpture for the River Blindless Foundation on behalf of an effort to eradicate riverblindness, a parasitic disease to which 80 million people are at risk in tropical Africa and Central America. Maquettes of this bronze study of a boy leading a blind elder are given to million dollar donors to the Carter Presidential Center, which has adopted the eradication of riverblindness as one of its prime objectives.

Wallen has monumental sculptures in Geneva, Switzerland; Amsterdam, Netherlands; The World Bank in Washington, D.C.; the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta; Merck & Co. World Headquarters at Whitehouse Station, N.J.; Lions Club International World Headquarters in Chicago; and The University of Houston, Texas, in addition to the new Lend-Lease Memorial in Fairbanks, and the Windfall Fisherman and Gang of Four at the DIPAC Hatchery in Juneau.

"Sanibel to Siberia" was produced for WGCU in Fort Myers by award-winning producer Joel Banow, formerly of CBS, and won two national Telly awards.