Sun and Moon, referred to by Indiana in a journal entry from November 18, 1959, as his "first real construction," consists of an old piece of wood the artist found on the loading platfrom of a long vacated loft on Front Street, in Lower Manhattan, and and an old rusted tricycle wheel, iron bar, and stove lid from Fire Island. As his first sculpture, it broke new ground for the artist, but it developed out of his existing practice of using found materials in his work. Stavrosis, his monumental drawing of 1958, was executed with printer's ink on paper using materials found in his Coenties Slip loft, remnants of its previous history as a printshop.
The work is recorded in his journal and in studio records as First Construction and was first exhibited under that title in 1972. By 1984, when it was included in Wood Works: Constructions by Robert Indiana in Washington D.C., Indiana had rechristened the work Sun and Moon.