“Role Exchange” takes a retrospective look at one of the most abiding themes in visual art: the artistic persona. It’s an ambitious undertaking for the summer art season. Sean Kelly’s curatorial team — four people in this instance — selected works created between the years of 1975 and 2006 by 27 contemporary artists. Predictably, given the time frame, photography and performance art predominate.

The wide range of stylistic and conceptual approaches to artistic personae on view is revelatory. As the press release notes, Marcel Duchamp’s invention of an artistic persona dubbed Rrose Sélavy in 1921 is a logical point of reference, but the curators took a 1975 photographic diptych by Marina Abramovic, titled “Role Exchange,” as their true point of departure. Ms. Abramovic, like many young artists of the 1970s, was experimenting with new strategies designed to include the artist’s own presence in the work as a commentary on art-making, labor, and existence itself.

In “Role Exchange,” Ms. Abramovic used photography and text to document a pioneering performance in which she exchanged places with a prostitute working legally in Amsterdam. For a few hours, the prostitute played the role of artist at Ms. Abramovic’s opening while the artist waited for clients. Ms. Abramovic’s gelatin silver diptych features each woman at work, and is accompanied by a short text outlining the terms of the performance.

Many of the works on view, in fact, traverse a psychological tightrope stretched between the performance of a role and personal identification with it. Along this slippery line, time and age, as well as gender, are negotiable variables. Robert Morris’s “Self Portrait,” in which he is accessorized in chains and a helmet, was originally a poster for a group exhibition at Castelli-Sonnabend Gallery in 1974. The 2007 version is a large gelatin silver print which has lost none of its incendiary impact. By contrast, a large C-print mounted on aluminum titled “The Liberated American Woman of the 1970s” (1997), by the African artist Samuel Fosso, is inviting and sweet. Mr. Fosso, all smiles, swaths himself in brightly colored fabrics and purple high heels while posing on bended knee against a lush yellow-green backdrop of painted vegetation.

Shy, by comparison, is Andy Warhol’s “Self Portrait in Drag” from 1981, a small color Polaroid in which the bangs of a shaggy platinum blond wig diffuse the aging artist’s direct yet glazed-over gaze. This work hangs beside Douglas Gordon’s bewigged homage to Warhol, a pair of color Polaroids titled “Staying Out and Going Home” (2005).

Among several works in moving imagery, Kalup Linzy’s black-andwhite DVD “Lollypop” (2006) stands out. Mr. Linzy and another performance artist, Shaun Leonardo, lip-synch to the eponymous jazz song, which was originally popularized in 1933 by a husband and wife duo, Hunter & Jenkins. Messrs. Linzy and Leonardo’s evocation of bygone performance styles brings to mind the poignant dance-theater performance politics of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane from the 1980s. In their absence, Mr. Linzy provides a welcome link to America’s jazz and vaudeville past.

The innermost gallery features a striking three-dimensional foil to the photographs and films. A Scottish-born, London-based artist, Gavin Turk, presents “Bum,” a hyper-real, life-size figurative sculpture made of wax and mixed media. The figure wears articles of clothing owned by the artist and purchased from thrift stores. “Bum” brings home, in an unsettling way, a creeping sense that one’s authentic identity and inhabited roles are two sides of the same coin.

* * *

The great sea mammal plays muse and mascot to an imaginative summer group exhibition at Tracy Williams Ltd. curated by Patrick Callery. All three galleries of the jewel-box townhouse are pierced by Valerie Hegarty’s sculptural harpoons (all 2007). Thanks to their metaphoric suggestion, a theatrical mise-en-scène engulfs the viewers: They, like Jonah, find themselves temporarily swallowed in the belly of a whale. Works by 15 contemporary artists in various media, by implication, are detritus from the briny deep that has happened to lodge there, too.

Mr. Callery’s curatorial premise is most effective in the first floor’s second gallery. A pieced leather rugwithlargewaxedcottonstitching by Jim Zivic viscerally anchors the animal theme to the ground plane, while Daniel Wiener’s sculpture “Blackglassplatter” (2007) suggests the presence of dark roiling seawater stilled in epoxy and glass.

Elsewhere in the room, one of Ms. Hegarty’s harpoons stabs the wall above a marble hearth. (A permanent architectural feature of this gallery, the hearth asserts itself to fine effect in this exhibition.) Nearby hangs Shamus Clisset’s black-and-white C-print “Untitled (Hollow Buddha)” (2006). The image depicts a vacuum-form plastic statue razored in half from top to bottom, so that we peer into the Buddha from behind; its cavities suggest Zen-like spirituality as well as the wizardry of Photoshop.

Notably, the garden level gallery features a wall-mounted sculpture of daring delicacy. Karsten Krejcarek’s 2007 work in urethane, fiberglass, and steel begins with finely wrought modeling, emerging from the wall, of female genitalia. Spiraling outward on a lone stem, a birdlike form resolves the termination. The incongruous yet haunting title is “It Don’t Pay To Think Too Much on Things You Leave Behind.”

Both until August 3; “Role Exchange” (528 W. 29th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-239-1181);

“Belly” (313 W. 4th St., between Bank and West 12th streets, 212-229-2757).