Roberta Breitmore Look Alike Contest
Oct 4, 2025
  • Roberta Look Alike Contest Saturday, October 4, 2025, 5-7 pm 1150 25th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 Join Altman Siegel...
    Roberta at Bus Stop, 1978
    Roberta Look Alike Contest
    Saturday, October 4, 2025, 5-7 pm
    1150 25th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
     
    Join Altman Siegel and Di Rosa SF for a special Roberta Look-Alike Contest. The contest celebrates Hershman Leeson's groundbreaking Roberta Breitmore project, in which the artist created and performed as a fictional persona from 1973-1978, exploring themes of constructed identity, surveillance, and the boundaries between reality and fiction. Judges: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Monique Jenkinson (Fauxnique), and Tony Bravo.
  • Who is Roberta Breitmore?

    Who is Roberta Breitmore?

    Lynn Hershman Leeson's Roberta Breitmore (1973-1978) was a decade-long performance art exploration in which the artist created and inhabited a fictional persona who lived as a real person in San Francisco. Beginning in 1973, Roberta Breitmore arrived by bus and checked into the Dante Hotel, then proceeded to live a fully documented life: opening a bank account, obtaining credit cards, renting an apartment, seeing a psychiatrist, and participating in contemporary trends like EST and Weight Watchers. Roberta had her own distinctive clothing, signature makeup, walk, gestures, speech patterns, and handwriting. When she placed ads seeking roommates, she received 43 responses and pursued interactions with 27 individuals, making them unwitting participants in the artwork.
  • The project was meticulously documented through 144 drawings, surveillance photographs, and artifacts including checks, credit cards, and a driver's license. In the fourth year, Roberta multiplied into four different people simultaneously embodying her identity. The performance concluded in 1978 at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, Italy, with an exorcism ritual in Lucrezia Borgia's crypt, where Roberta was symbolically transformed through the elements of fire, water, air, and earth. Hershman Leeson later collaborated with Zap Comix artist Spain Rodriguez to document Roberta's escapades in a graphic novel.
  • “Roberta was at once artificial and real. A non-person, . . . Roberta's first live action was to place an...
    “Roberta was at once artificial and real.  A non-person, . . . Roberta's first live action was to place an ad in a local newspaper for a roommate.  People who answered the ad became participants in her adventure.  As she became part of their reality, they became part of her fiction. Roberta's manipulated reality became a model for a private system of interactive performances.  Instead of being kept on a disc or hardware, her records were stored as photographs and texts that could be viewed without predetermined sequences.  This allowed viewers to become voyeurs into Roberta's history.”
     
    –Lynn Hershman Leeson
  • The Roberta Breitmore project explored the constructed nature of identity and the blurred boundaries between fiction and reality, presaging many contemporary concerns about virtual existence and self-presentation. The work raised fundamental questions about the fluid, ungraspable nature of identity, examining how truth and authenticity become indistinguishable from fiction and performance. By creating a persona that existed through documentation, social interactions, and bureaucratic records, Hershman Leeson interrogated whether we can ever truly know ourselves or others, revealing how appearances deceive and identity itself is fundamentally constructed rather than innate. These concerns have only intensified in our current digital age, where internet personas, social media profiles, and the culture of self-styling have made Roberta's questions about performed identity more relevant than ever. The project's non-linear documentation allowed viewers to construct their own interpretations of Roberta's story, creating an early interactive artwork that questioned surveillance, authenticity, and the nature of existence itself. Through Roberta, Hershman Leeson anticipated how identity would become increasingly mediated, documented, and performed—transforming a 1970s art project into a prophetic commentary on contemporary life.
  • The Roberta Breitmore Look Alike Contest will be held in conjunction with About Time, a solo exhibition by Lynn Hershman Leeson, on view at Altman Siegel through October 11, 2025.
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