Gober’s Hanging Man/Sleeping Man has become a touchstone of American art made during the political and social upheavals of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which included the AIDS epidemic, the culture wars, and the Los Angeles riots. The work features two images side by side, one of a sleeping white man in bed and another of a lynched black man hanging from a tree, their juxtaposition outlining the history of racial inequality in the United States. Gober came across the source images while researching hate crimes for an interview he conducted with Congressman John Conyers Jr., author of the Hate Crimes Statistics Act.

The artist wrote recently about the genesis of Hanging Man/Sleeping Man,
“So as I nursed friends who were dying unnaturally young […] in the face of deliberate government inaction, I was also thinking hard about American cruelty in a historical perspective. […] Hanging Man/Sleeping Man merged imagery that came intuitively out of those two big concerns.”

Hanging Man/Sleeping Man was first exhibited in 1989, as part of an installation now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. When the museum reinstalled the work in 2009 it was accompanied by a text written by the artist, which read, in part, “The painful imagery depicted on the wallpaper of this 1989 installation was meant as a reminder of fact — the ugly and unforgettable reality of the United States’ history. By putting this image onto endlessly repeating wallpaper, I made an attempt to say, metaphorically, that this was not an isolated event and that in ways it has become our background.”