We like to think of artists as singular geniuses. But often the richest stories emerge when two of them are displayed side by side—when their differences rhyme, when their echoes deepen one another. That’s the idea behind “Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina,” at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts through Jan. 11. It’s the first time these two have been brought into dialogue, and what emerges is not sameness but resonance.

Both were immigrants. Both were women navigating a field dominated by men. Both became vital to American abstraction at a time when it wasn’t yet welcome here. Yet they approached art from nearly opposite directions: Slobodkina is disciplined, architectural, methodical; Nevelson is theatrical, monumental, intuitive. Their works look nothing alike, but put them together and you start to hear the harmony. Each makes the other legible. Each sharpens the other’s edge.

Slobodkina came from Russia by way of China, shaped by exile but hungry for a universal visual language. She co-founded the American Abstract Artists in the 1930s, convinced that abstraction was a modern necessity. Her paintings are disciplined fields of flat planes and clean lines, compositions that hum with Constructivist rigor filtered through New York’s industrial optimism. Even her beloved children’s book “Caps for Sale” reveals her dual gift: playful yet structured, whimsical yet balanced.

Nevelson, who emigrated from Ukraine as a child, grew up among Maine lumber yards, an early apprenticeship in the........

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