The Red Dot

The Red Dot takes its name from the small sticker that once marked slides in a physical archive, flagging them as worth a second look. We’re keeping that spirit alive here.

At MIRL, we engage with art history, digital humanities, and material culture through hands-on research and archival projects. Guided by our core principles—critical engagement with visual and material culture, ethical stewardship of images and data, and innovative approaches to research and pedagogy—we work at the intersection of technology and the humanities. We are especially interested in how digital tools can expand the study of images, objects, and spaces.

The Red Dot © 2025 is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 

  • Recent ARTstor collection releases and agreements

    ARTstor has announced that 833 images (69% of the roughly 1,200 projected total) from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum are now available in the Digital Library [keyword search: okeeffemuseum]. Additionally, agreements have been reached with the following institutions and should be available by April (all image counts are approximate): Diego Rivera at the Detroit Institute of… Read more

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  • Leonardo da Vinci in Los Angeles

    The Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles will host a short-run exhibition that features a rare showing of Leonardo’s drawing Angel in the Flesh (c. 1513-1515). Also included will be selections from Leonardo’s The Theatre Sheet (c. 1506-1508, from the Atlanticus Codex) and video artist Bill Viola’s installation The Last Angel (2002). Opening night, scholar… Read more

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  • SAHARA and ARTstor

    ARTstor has partnered with SAHARA (Society of Architectural Historians Architecture Resources Archive) to include  SAH members’  photography.   While much of this collection has only been available to SAH members, a large selection, called “Editor’s Choice” is now available to all ARTstor licensors.  The SAHARA collection in ARTstor now has nearly 9,000 images, and 72 new… Read more

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  • New Museum Exhibitions in SoCal

    Lots of new things opening  – a few highlights: New exhibitions at the Huntington include “The Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography from the Jay T. Last Collection”, “Central Avenue and Beyond: The Harlem Renaissance in Los Angeles”,  “Drawn to Satire: John Sloan’s Illustrations for the Novels of Charles Paul de Kock”, and continuing  “British Watercolors… Read more

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  • Ingres at the Norton Simon

    The Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena has announced that Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845) has arrived on loan from The Frick Collection in New York. The portrait, the first loan from the Frick in an art exchange program between the two institutions, will be exhibited October 30, 2009–January 25, 2010. The loan is also… Read more

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  • Archivision Module 4 now available through ARTstor too

    The architectural holdings available to us keep getting better!  The Archivision base collection, and modules 1 and 2, have been available in ARTstor to all UC campuses for a few months.  Module 4 is the group of 6,000 images that we’ve had available through MDID only (the license for which was won at the VRA… Read more

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