Roberta Breitmore Look Alike Contest: Presented by Altman Siegel and di Rosa SF
Oct 4, 2025
  • The Roberta Look Alike Contest celebrates Lynn Hershman Leeson's iconic Roberta Breitmore project, in which the artist created and performed...
    Roberta at Bus Station, 1976

    The Roberta Look Alike Contest celebrates Lynn Hershman Leeson's iconic Roberta Breitmore project, in which the artist created and performed as a fictional persona from 1972-1978, exploring themes of constructed identity, gender, and the boundaries between reality and fiction. 

     

     

    Saturday, October 4, 2025, 5-7 pm

    1150 25th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

    Judges: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Monique Jenkinson (Fauxnique), and Tony Bravo
  • Who is Roberta Breitmore?

    Roberta Multiples in San Francisco, 1978 

    Who is Roberta Breitmore?

    Roberta Breitmore (1972-1978) was a performance by Lynn Hershman Leeson in which the artist invented and inhabited a constructed persona who lived as a seemingly real person in San Francisco. Beginning in 1972, 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 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.
  • “Roberta represented a manufactured image of the ideals fostered in advertising, fashion and beauty magazines. She was a composite of...

    Roberta Breitmore (An Alchemical Portrait): Cover, Drawn by Spain Rodriguez, 1975 
    “Roberta represented a manufactured image of the ideals fostered in advertising, fashion and beauty magazines. She was a composite of accumulated stereotypes and psychological data."
     
    –Lynn Hershman Leeson, Private I, 2025
  • The project was documented through drawings, surveillance photographs, and artifacts including checks, credit cards, and a driver's license. In the fourth year of the project, Roberta multiplied into four different people simultaneously embodying one 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.
  • Exorcism (Multiple Roberta being Transformed: Michelle Larson), 1978
     
  • 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 media 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. Through Roberta, Hershman Leeson anticipated how identity would become increasingly documented and performed.
  • "Roberta was a double mirror. She simultaneously reflected and refracted society's biases. Clothing, checks, credit cards, driver's license, psychiatric reports, diary entries, letters, tape recordings—all became the archived remains of her artificial life. Roberta's detritus allowed viewers to become voyeurs to her history. Archived photographs, objects, documents, and texts proved her existence. Roberta's manipulated reality, decades ahead of the engineered dramas of reality TV, were a model for a private system of interactive performance."
    – Lynn Hershman Leeson, Private I, 2025

     
  • The Roberta Breitmore Look Alike Contest is 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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