Poet Stephen Berg and visual artist Tom Chimes describe Sleeping Woman as a "choral voice rising out of the site." The collaborative work was created specifically for this location and was commissioned by the Fairmount Park Art Association with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The text, painted without punctuation on the top of the stone retaining wall that separates the Schuylkill River and the grass bank of Kelly Drive, was applied with a series of polyurethane coatings so that the words "emerge" from the stone. Depending upon the variable light and the angle of the observer, the letterforms appear and disappear. The center of the text is marked by the word "RIVER."

Sleeping Woman is composed without punctuation, much like ancient Greek performance texts." Chimes describes the line as a "legible whisper; its surface will mirror the weather...the line will be part of the landscape." Unlike a book or poem, the line speaks to the reader from the ground. Berg gives voice to many authors and sources (in order of appearance in the line) including: Sophocles from Oedipus Tyrannus, Thoreau from Walden, Buson's haiku, Yeats's letters, various fragments from Sappho, poems by Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, Buber's Tales from the Hassidic Masters, Pound's Cantos, and calligraphy from the Tea House in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A few months after the project was completed, a 200-foot section of the wall sank into the river. Berg observed that the collapse embodied a major theme of the text: the power of nature and the transformation of life.

Adapted from Public Art in Philadelphia by Penny Balkin Bach (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1992).