ST. PETERSBURG / SCULPTURE / INSPIRATION
Mark Aeling.
Big ideas.
Real materials.
Mark Aeling made a pair of lips from more than ten thousand colored pencils. He has also made lips from butterflies and from surgical scissors. The last one is called A Cutting Remark, which is a fairly good indication that the St. Petersburg sculptor enjoys language almost as much as materials.
His Lip Series changes meaning as the component parts change. The pencil work, Chromorifice, turns something like a field of pixels into a three-dimensional surface. Butterfly Kiss uses hundreds of individual butterfly forms. The scissors bring an entirely different association to the same general anatomy.
That is an inviting way into Aeling’s work. You can recognize the image immediately and then discover how it was made. The second look changes the first. A familiar shape becomes a question about the small things that compose it, and the title may give you one more reason to smile.
His career has taken that curiosity into public spaces on a much larger scale, while his community work has helped other artists keep a place to make things of their own.
46 feet
across
16,000
pounds
First Flight, completed 2020.
Dimensions and weight reported by MGA Sculpture Studio.
The weight
behind flight.
At St. Petersburg’s waterfront, First Flight recreates the Benoist airboat associated with the city’s pioneering commercial aviation history. Aeling’s studio completed the life-size work in 2020. Its construction record lists a forty-six-foot width and a weight of sixteen thousand pounds.
Those numbers give a little perspective on the making. The studio’s process documentation follows the work from digital renderings through labeled, waterjet-cut parts and assembled wings. Aeling used historical photographs while shaping the figures of pilot Tony Jannus and passenger A.C. Pheil for bronze casting.
An object associated with flight becomes a substantial exercise in structure, weight and assembly. The finished sculpture can suggest movement because a team did the slower work of making sure every connection belonged where it was supposed to be.
I like having access to that process. It lets the viewer appreciate the people and decisions behind an object that might otherwise seem simply to have appeared at its destination.
Aeling’s MGA Sculpture Studio occupies a large workspace in St. Petersburg’s Warehouse Arts District, with the room and ceiling height needed for major fabrications. The business began in St. Louis and moved to Florida in 2005.
The scale of the studio is part of the artistic story. A monumental sculpture needs space to become itself. It also needs people who can move between a drawing and a material that will resist, bend, join or finish in particular ways. The work has to survive its translation out of the artist’s imagination.
That translation is one of the pleasures of Aeling’s career. His ideas are playful, but the making is serious. A large public work must succeed as both an image and a physical object.
A drill.
A jigsaw.
Some clamps.
In Julie Garisto’s 2016 interview for Alive Tampa Bay, Aeling remembered asking for a jigsaw, a drill and clamps for Christmas in seventh grade. He described building the studio one job at a time, buying equipment with money earned from the work.
That is a pleasingly specific childhood wish list. Even then, the present he wanted was a way to make other things possible. The equipment changed as the projects grew, but the pleasure of having the means to make something is easy to recognize.
A flower outside
the police station.
For St. Petersburg’s police headquarters, Aeling created Gladiolus, an exterior sculpture, and Shielded, a suspended interior work. In the studio’s account of Gladiolus, the flower becomes a way to bring strength and welcome into the same form. A mirrored sphere allows visitors to see themselves within it.
That last detail makes the relationship with the building more interesting. A civic sculpture has a particular audience: the people who work there and the people who arrive for reasons of their own. Those visitors will bring different feelings to the encounter. A reflection introduces their presence into the work, however briefly.
Public art can operate at that modest level. It can give someone an unexpected moment of attention while entering a place where art was not the reason for the visit. The encounter does not require a ticket or a decision to spend the afternoon in a museum.
Aeling’s project record reaches across parks, campuses and commercial settings. It includes Nurture for Cranes Roost Park in Altamonte Springs and Ascent, a collaboration with Christopher Still at Opal Sands in Clearwater. More recently, the studio recorded the March 2026 installation of Nexus at the University of Utah’s Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine.
The range requires an artist to consider the place around the work. A sculpture for a park has a different relationship with its viewers than one suspended in a lobby. Light, distance, movement and the architecture become part of the encounter.
Keep the makers
in the arts district.
There is another kind of construction in Aeling’s story: helping preserve the conditions under which artists can work.
The Warehouse Arts District Association’s history describes a familiar concern. Artists find affordable space in an overlooked neighborhood. Their presence makes it attractive. Rising costs can eventually displace the people who helped give it character.
Aeling participated in the early discussions about St. Petersburg’s district. The association formed in 2012 and purchased its ArtsXchange property in late 2014. The campus opened in 2017, with further education and performance spaces following.
The importance of ownership is fairly easy to understand. If affordable workspace is the goal, having a durable stake in the buildings gives the organization more ability to protect that purpose. It is a practical response to a problem that admiration for artists alone does not solve.
Aeling has helped lead that effort alongside other artists, supporters and community partners. It is work that supports the next object someone makes, even when his own name will never appear on it.
Willing to lead.
Willing to ask.
His account of taking on community leadership is refreshingly candid, too. In the St. Pete Catalyst’s published interview transcript, Aeling recalled asking attorney Rob Kapusta to advise him when he became the association’s president. He was willing to take responsibility and knew he needed help.
I admire that willingness to begin with an honest assessment of what you can do. Aeling’s experience with sculpture had given him reasons to trust collaboration. Bringing another person’s judgment into the community work made that ambition more capable, too. Someone who knows how much goes into a finished object can respect how much goes into an organization.
Somewhere to return
to work tomorrow.
The association now offers studios, galleries, education and public events. Its Second Saturday ArtWalk connects visitors with the place where the work happens. That is a useful relationship for a city to sustain: people can enjoy finished art while also learning something about the lives and spaces behind it.
There is room in an arts community for different scales of ambition. Someone may need a place to paint. Someone else may need enough clearance to assemble an enormous metal form. Both need the ordinary continuity of being able to return to work tomorrow.
Aeling’s studio team includes fabricators, designers and other artists. The roster even gives shop dog Homer the title of visionary. It is an affectionate detail in a business whose work can demand considerable precision.
The team structure makes sense when you look across the projects. An idea becomes a design; a design becomes pieces; those pieces become something the public can walk around, look through or encounter on an ordinary day.
Aeling has made that process visible in both his sculpture and his community work. He can turn thousands of small objects into a recognizable expression. He can also help people with different skills build a place where more art becomes possible. In St. Petersburg, both kinds of making leave something substantial behind.
About Mark Aeling
Where is Mark Aeling’s studio?
MGA Sculpture Studio is based in St. Petersburg’s Warehouse Arts District. Aeling moved the business from St. Louis to Florida in 2005.
What is Mark Aeling’s First Flight?
First Flight is a life-size sculpture of the Benoist airboat at St. Petersburg’s waterfront. Completed in 2020, it measures 46 feet across and weighs 16,000 pounds, according to MGA Sculpture Studio.
How has Mark Aeling supported other artists?
Aeling helped develop and lead the Warehouse Arts District Association, whose ArtsXchange campus provides studio space, galleries, arts education and public events.
Sources: MGA Sculpture Studio’s project records, process documentation and team pages; the Warehouse Arts District Association’s history and current programs; Julie Garisto’s 2016 Alive Tampa Bay interview; and the St. Pete Catalyst’s published interview transcript. Project and organization details checked September 2026. Reflections on making and collaboration are Rob Urban’s.
For more of my writing and approach to consulting, meet Rob.