JENi Dawn Art

Soon after, Griner applied for and was accepted into an elementary artist-in-residence program, where her work was exhibited publicly for the first time. That experience marked an early understanding that art could exist beyond the private act of making. Throughout middle and high school, she gravitated toward art spaces that offered freedom rather than prescription. Her high school art teacher, Mr. Parrish, a practicing artist himself, provided an environment rich in materials and autonomy. While unconventional, his classroom fostered experimentation, peer learning, and self-direction. That freedom—creating because she wanted to, not because she was told to—built resilience and curiosity that would shape her practice for decades.

Recognition followed organically: local exhibitions, Kiwanis fair awards, and school honors that affirmed her trajectory without narrowing it.

Firespark and Formal Becoming

A pivotal turning point came through Firespark, a summer art intensive at Brenau University. There, Griner encountered rigorous instruction, disciplined seeing, and mentors who recognized her potential before she fully recognized it herself. In drawing courses led by Neal Smith-Willow, then Brenau’s drawing and painting professor, she experienced the power of foundational training and sustained observation. Design courses with Dr. Mary Jane Taylor introduced her to structure, visual language, and critical thinking that would shape her artistic framework permanently.

During her second summer at Firespark, Dr. Taylor quietly initiated a portfolio review process that included work Griner had created years earlier—saved meticulously by her father. Unbeknownst to Griner, this review functioned as an admissions interview. Weeks later, she received acceptance to Brenau along with a faculty art scholarship. Dr. Taylor would go on to become Griner’s advisor, mentor, and lifelong friend—one of the most formative relationships in her development as an artist and educator.

While studying at Brenau, Griner worked all four years as assistant to the curator under Jean Westmacott, whose influence proved foundational in a different but equally enduring way. Westmacott introduced Griner to the professional rigor of the art world—teaching responsibility, persistence, precision, and the expectation that ideas are only as meaningful as one’s commitment to realizing them fully. Under her guidance, Griner learned that no concept is too ambitious if met with discipline and follow-through.

Through this role, Griner gained rare, hands-on experience with original works by major figures of the Pop Art movement, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and others whose work she handled directly. Westmacott trained her in professional etiquette, institutional standards, and the ethics of care required when stewarding cultural objects. These lessons extended beyond the gallery: Griner had opportunities to meet and converse with influential figures across art, industry, and education, including Leo Castelli, Robert Rauschenberg, Coca-Cola CEO Doug Ivester, and Georgia Superintendent of Schools Richard Woods. Westmacott was the first to hold Griner fully accountable as a professional, instilling expectations that continue to shape her practice.

At Brenau, Griner’s understanding of art expanded beyond skill into responsibility. She was exposed to leadership, professional art worlds, and conversations that challenged her to see art as both personal and consequential. She enrolled without hesitation.

At Brenau, Griner’s understanding of art expanded beyond skill into responsibility. She was exposed to leadership, critical dialogue, and professional art worlds that felt simultaneously distant and suddenly accessible. These years confirmed her identity as an artist—but also introduced a tension that would follow her for years to come: the cultural narrative of the “starving artist,” and the pressure to justify art through utility.

Detour, Dislocation, and the Cost of Misalignment

Graduating into expectations of practicality, Griner pursued commercial art and graphic design. She excelled—winning awards, securing internships, and producing high-level professional work. Yet success came at a cost. Commercial design’s demand-driven creativity left little room for authorship or meaning, and as her career advanced, her personal art practice receded. Marriage, early motherhood, and long work hours compounded the distance. Though materially successful, she found herself profoundly disconnected—from her work, from her children’s early years, and from herself.

That dissonance ultimately forced a reckoning. Returning to South Georgia with two young sons, Griner stepped away from corporate design. During a year at home, she quietly returned to drawing, sketching, and painting—often in fragments and margins. Community murals and small personal works reawakened her relationship to making, not as production but as sustenance.

Teaching as Return, Not Retreat

Teaching entered Griner’s life unexpectedly. With no formal education training and little desire to enter the profession, she accepted a position at a private school largely because it allowed proximity to her children. What began as pragmatism quickly revealed itself as vocation.

After five years in private education, Griner was persuaded to return to her alma mater to teach in a public high school art classroom. This return was catalyzed by her former principal, Dr. Tom Bigwood, who insisted she give public education one year before walking away from teaching entirely. That year became seven. Teaching in the same classroom where she had once been a student created a profound sense of continuity and repair. Surrounded by young artists and creative energy, her own studio practice re-emerged with urgency and depth.

Griner maintains contact with Dr. Bickwood decades later, recognizing him as one of several influential figures who refused to let her underestimate the value of her work.

Art as Self-Understanding

During this period, Griner began producing deeply personal work—large-scale portraits, symbolic landscapes, and a series of charcoal drawings based on female literary and mythological figures. These works functioned as self-portraits in disguise, giving form to experiences of divorce, single motherhood, displacement, and personal transformation. Figures such as Pandora, Ophelia, and Lilith became vessels through which she processed anger, grief, and reclamation. While the work did not resolve these experiences, it strengthened her voice and affirmed art’s role as a means of understanding rather than solution.

Exhibitions and juried shows followed, marking her transition into professional adult art spaces. Yet even as recognition increased, Griner remained primarily focused on teaching—pouring her energy into students who would go on to careers in animation, game design, fashion, ceramics, photography, and arts education. Creativity, she came to believe, is communal. It thrives in ecosystems, not isolation.

Expansion, Leadership, and Another Quiet Loss

Over the next decade, Griner taught in large, nationally recognized schools in North Georgia, completed a master’s degree in art education, and became a leader in the field—presenting at state and national conferences, mentoring educators, and shaping curriculum. These years were professionally rich, yet her personal art practice again narrowed. She was making work, but not fully inhabiting the role of artist. There is a difference, she realized, between making art and being an artist.

COVID, Constraint, and Reclamation

The COVID-19 pandemic forced an abrupt pause. Separated from classrooms and colleagues, Griner turned inward. With limited materials and no dedicated studio, she began experimenting—grinding leaves into pigments, painting with coffee, wine, tea, and red Georgia clay. Much of this work lived in sketchbooks and journals, process-driven and private. In isolation, she rediscovered curiosity and play.

A year later, an unexpected opportunity emerged: the acquisition of a small barn that would become her first dedicated studio. With the help of her partner, Rob, the structure was relocated, renovated, and transformed into a sanctuary. For the first time, Griner’s life materially affirmed her practice. Space created consistency; consistency created momentum.

Larger Than Life and Voices Silenced

With a studio and renewed clarity, Griner’s work shifted decisively. She began Larger Than Life, a series of monumental paintings derived from small, fragile family photographs. Enlarged to confrontational scale, these works preserve lineage, labor, and memory—honoring ancestors whose stories risk erasure. Paintings such as Daddy and the 1949 John Deere serve as both personal tribute and cultural record, bridging rural Southern history with contemporary methods, including the careful use of AI to reconstruct lost likenesses.

Concurrently, Griner initiated Voices Silenced, an ongoing memorial series honoring students and educators killed in U.S. school shootings. Each work follows a strict symbolic system: canvas size corresponds to lives lost, school colors inform the ground, and individual flowers represent each victim. These paintings are not political statements but acts of remembrance—designed to slow the viewer, demand presence, and refuse abstraction of loss.

Recognizing the ethical weight of this work, Griner is developing a scholarship fund supported by proceeds from Voices Silenced. The fund will support students pursuing the arts who have been directly affected by school violence, ensuring that the work gives back materially as well as symbolically.

Practice Now

Today, Griner creates almost daily—often alongside her students during shared studio time. Her identity has shifted from art teacher to artist-educator, with the artist increasingly at the center. Large-scale works occupy her studio; collaborative projects and exhibitions continue to expand her reach. When separated from the studio, she plans, sketches, and prepares, maintaining momentum regardless of circumstance.

Griner’s work insists on attention—not through spectacle, but through care. It asks viewers to look closely, to remember deliberately, and to consider their relationship to history, violence, and inheritance. For her, art is not an escape from life. It is a way of staying present within it.