Odilon Redon at MoMA; Robert Rauschenberg, Santiago Calatrava, Fra Angelico, and Antonello da Messina at the Met; Richard Tuttle, Raymond Pettibon, and Oscar Bluemner at the Whitney – most art exhibitions today mine the resources of a single personality, often to the exclusion of historical context or the contemporary weave of ideas.

It’s not difficult to understand why this is so. Individual artists are more easily marketed to the public than abstruse concepts; discrete lives make for good stories. I wouldn’t want to argue that the single-artist approach needs revising. But quite a few curators lament the dearth of thematic exhibitions these days, and one can certainly make a credible argument for a slightly healthier balance between thematic and single-artist approaches.

One new and modestly sized exhibition at the Whitney takes as its unifying metaphor something the vast majority of living artists have in common: the epidermis. Co-curated by Gary Foster and Apsara DiQuinzio, “Skin Is a Language” brings together 13 contemporary works from the museum’s permanent collection, all of which relate in some way to “body’s outer layer.”

If you were around the art world at all in the early ’90s, you would know that skin speaks first to the problem of identity. When Glenn Ligon’s “Untitled (Ralph Ellison)” was made in 1994, museums and galleries were almost drowning in what had become the stagnant waters of identity politics. More than a decade on, however, Mr. Ligon’s rendering, in stenciled black oil stick, of an excerpt from Ellison’s celebrated novel – “I am an invisible man,” etc. – expresses a sharp irony, particularly in the context of this show. Describing his racial invisibility, the “speaker” in the piece is made visible by his words. Here language becomes skin, the surface by which the invisible man is seen or known.

As a surface, skin has become in our era a sort of canvas: for the display of tattoos and tribal scars, piercings and jewelry, clothes and cosmetics, tans, plastic surgery, and just about any other modification one might imagine. Strangely enough, these are phenomena barely touched upon by this show.

Catherine Opie’s “Self-Portrait/Cutting” (1993), a photograph of a woman’s back into which bloody stick figures in front of a house have been carved, is a somewhat gruesome though witty take on body-morphing. Is the self-portrait the photograph or the picture gouged into the woman’s back?

With “Head 1968,” a zippered S &M mask lacquered and mounted on a pedestal, Nancy Grossman gestures at the notion that bodily decoration can reveal more than it conceals. Roni Horn’s “Clownmirror (2)” (2001) is even more straightforward: The makeup and blurring in her two, mirror-image clown portraits conceal the sitter’s identity outright.

For the most part, the show addresses skin broadly through metaphor. Such an approach offers a diverse, and perhaps more diverting, aesthetic experience, but it also dilutes the theme almost to the point of invisibility.That Ellen Gallagher’s untitled watercolorand-paper collage contains the pastedon faces of black people seems an insufficient reason to include it. Is a black artist’s skin always at issue? For the sake of black artists, let’s hope not. Still, like many of Ms. Gallagher’s works in paper, the example on view is utterly beautiful. Above the collaged faces, the artist has carved eels and other serpentine shapes into the paper, drawing with a knife far more ably than the cutter in Ms. Opie’s photo.

I couldn’t quite see what Bruce Conner’s excellent sculpture “Medusa” (1960) had to do with skin either, except that the head – rendered in wax, rubber tubing, wood, string, and hair – was covered, mask-like, by a nylon stocking. But I was happy to see it.

At the farthest end of the metaphorical spectrum were works such as Eva Hesse’s untitled photogram of a leaf with stems. From her graduate-school years, the black-and-white, X-ray-like image of a partially broken oval leaf demonstrates the fragility and decay of all organic surfaces and coverings. How time and other forces change the look of things is also the ostensible subject of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s eight photogravures depicting patterns in sand wrought, one supposes, by wind or rain or feet.

The only real wart in all this dermal art was, to my mind, a lazy screenprint by Jasper Johns, “Target With Four Faces” (1968). Included perhaps for the four faces (noses and mouths, actually) running across the top border, the print is simply a Johns targetimage updated, with bright colors, to gratify the taste for Pop Art in the late ’60s. Or maybe the point is that Mr. Johns is a chameleon changing color on the surface in order to fit better into his surroundings.

Ultimately the justification for including any one piece here is a secondary concern.The fact is that on the fifth floor of the Whitney, where examples from the permanent collection are meant to be displayed, the curators have used a big metaphorical tent to show off a few lovely and intriguing objects. If you don’t think these pieces all go together, it’s no skin off their backs.

Until May 21 (945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, 800-WHITNEY).