Rauschenberg made Sleep for Yvonne Rainer as part of a series of three 1965 works dedicated to artists with whom he was working closely at the time. The other two works, Fossil for Bob Morris and N.Y. Bird Calls for Öyvind Fahlström, are in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and owned by a private collector, respectively. For further discussion of Rauschenberg’s collaborations with Morris and Fahlström, see note 1 in the
essay on Sleep for Yvonne Rainer.