Tatayana Grosman invited Bontecou to make lithographs for ULAE after viewing her 1962 Leo Castelli Gallery exhibition, which prominently featured the artist's drawings. Bontecou's first lithograph, aptly-named First Stone (1962), reveals tentative explorations of the same imagery – textured, loosely fragmented gestural shapes encircling a void or hole – that she created in her drawings and sculpture. Her explorations with lithography and etching continued at ULAE until the early 1980s.

This print was produced by drawing with lithographic crayon directly on limestone. As she described: “I was just testing things out on a stone. It was the first I’d ever done, so I just took different symbols and worked them out. I didn’t try to think of a composition. I just put it all on.” Nevertheless, the forms—her signature black holes, cosmic bursts, insect-like carapaces, mutant sea creatures—are laid out with careful attention to the composition.