Works out of his small Staten Island studio producing paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Takes a machine-shop course in making and using tools. Begins to experiment with photographing his work and himself, and models, in plaster, a series of free-standing and relief sculptures, which become the basis of some of his first constructions – Crescent Throat, Airport Sentinel, and Pierced Bipolar – in thin-gauged sheet metal, brass, copper, and aluminum. 

Exhibits in the First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

"While painting, there was this sustained activity in sculpture that was limited to the plaster of paris works. They were highly abstract and, I might say, monolithic, rather than concerned with any openness of space and complex interrelationship of planes, or anything of that kind. I think it was already fairly well intuitively felt that sculpture had an important role and an important part in my whole visual orientation." [ Interview by Elliott with Theodore Roszak, February 13, 1956]