Juan Manuel Campos with two of his paintings at the Latino Cultural Center in 2013

Juan Manuel Campos, a native of Mexico who put the art in the Bishop Arts District starting in the 1980s, died last month from COVID-19. He was 84.

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Campos was the last living member of an art collective called Artistas, which also included Alfonso Estrada, Vincent Morin, Filberto Chapa and Anita Cisneros.

Campos and his wife of almost 40 years, Rosa, bought their house on North Bishop in 1989. He was inspired from a young age by comic books, Hollywood movies, James Dean and Elvis Presley, and their house became a brightly painted outdoor gallery of his portraits of pop-culture figures.

Photo by Danny Fulgencio

Campos kept busy constantly, often waking in the middle of the night with an idea and turning on the lights to paint.

“I paint because it’s in my blood,” Campos told The Advocate last year.

Rosa Campos says her husband was making sketches even after he was taken to the hospital on Nov. 7. But he took a turn for the worse on Friday, Nov. 13, and he died a week later after a massive stroke at the hospital.

She’s in quarantine after two positive tests, she says, but she hasn’t been sick.

“This monster is weird,” she says.

Juan Manuel had his studio in the front room of their house, and the Camposes, who have no children, lived together in 450 square feet at the back. Rosa says friends and family members are dropping off food and finding other ways to support her.

“Unfortunately, everything is out of whack,” she says. “Everything you do for 40 years without thinking about it, and suddenly you don’t know what to do.”

She’s planning to hold a memorial service next summer.

Here’s an excerpt from our February story about Juan Manuel Campos:

Juan Manuel Campos started his art career as a kid growing up in Mexico, photographing wedding portraits on black-and-white film and then developing the photos and hand coloring them with acrylic paint. It was a painstaking craft that required needlelike brushes and a high degree of skill. He moved to Dallas in 1981, and you’ve seen the little house he shares with wife, Rosa. It’s the one painted teal and orange, with portraits of Selena, John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor outside. The Camposes bought the house in 1989. Rosa says her relatives asked at the time, “Why would you buy a house in the ghetto?” But she opened her hair salon in the front room, and they still live happily in a few hundred square feet at the back. Now the former hair salon is an art studio, where 83-year-old Juan Manual Campos paints every day, “almost all day,” his wife says. Soft guitar music plays as he shows some of his work: A two-sided wood cutout of Frida Kahlo, a charcoal portrait of   Emiliano Zapata, James Dean as Jett Rink in black-and-white acrylic. Jesus, head in hands, looming large over sepia-toned immigrants at the barbed- wire border. A friend recently replaced their water heater, but Campos kept the old one, and he’s copying vintage comic book panels onto it in oil paint.