It’s 9:30 on a Friday night, and Jenedy Paige is in her studio putting the finishing touches on a painting that will be on display in a week.
She likes to talk and paint, so she’s chatting with me on the phone while she adds little details to her piece that depicts a woman named Kamali’i Stopper lifting weights with her young son, Grayson.
Paige has titled this painting “Strong Like Mom.” As she’s worked on it, she has thought often of “Behold Your Little Ones,” a 1978 talk about the power of motherhood from Gordon B. Hinckley, former president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“How do you make a strong people? Well, you put the ideas into the hearts of the mothers, and then they inspire the kids,” Paige, an artist and mom of four based in Pleasant Grove, Utah, tells me with a conviction that makes it feel like her own sermon.
We talked on the phone for an hour that night. A week later, “Strong Like Mom” and 29 other paintings of women who have inspired Paige were on display at the Hale Centre Theatre in Sandy as part of a full-day event called Strong Women Experience.
It was an event four years in the making for Paige. But it wasn’t the only big moment for her that week. Just a few days before, she was part of filming for “American Ninja Warrior” — her sixth time competing on the show.
She had wanted to finish all of her paintings by July, but her schedule is often hectic. So in the final days leading up to the Strong Women Experience, Paige reassured herself with advice from a former mentor.
“You can’t bleed for every painting.”
Painting strength
All of the women Paige has painted form a diverse but unifying collection. And the story behind each woman is unique.
There’s Tia Stokes, the mom of five who, when diagnosed with leukemia during the early days of the pandemic, chose to dance her way through treatment as she was isolated even from her family in the hospital. Every day during her treatment, she did a dance on TikTok to share the joy of being alive.
There’s Sarah Frei Mills, who at the age of 17 had both of her legs amputated above the knee due to an auto accident. Paige was so struck by Mills’ optimism in the face of something so unimaginable that she painted “Hope on the Horizon,” which shows Mills on Antelope Island at sunrise.
One of Paige’s favorite paintings, “It Counts to Try,” shows 26-year-old Annie Ogden hanging from a bar with a sort of wry expression on her face as she struggles to complete her first pullup.
For Paige, all of these stories highlight different forms of strength. Since art can often act as a mirror, she can see glimpses of herself in these women, in these paintings.
Their strength adds to her own.
Her strength — physically, mentally and spiritually — is something she’s worked hard to build and rebuild throughout her life.
And it’s something she has come to especially rely on in the 14 years since the death of her 3-year-old son.
‘You’re just shattered’
Paige describes a moment that separates her life into two distinct parts.
On Sept. 26, 2011, Paige pulled her 3-year-old son, Victory Morgan, motionless from a swimming pool.
On that day, her life “shattered into a million pieces.”
“I don’t know if there really are the words to describe how it feels to lose your kid,” she previously said in a clip that aired during her run on “American Ninja Warrior” last season. “You realize that you’re super broken, that you’re just shattered. You gotta find a way to channel it.”
Victory Morgan died Nov. 12, 2011, after seven weeks in the hospital.
Art was an immediate outlet for Paige to work through her grief. She found it cathartic as she let her emotions out on the canvas. Shortly after her son’s death, she painted a portrait of Victory that has always had a place in the entry of her home.
But the artist needed another outlet, so she got into running — somewhat of a stretch for her since she described herself as more of a “nerdy musician” type than an athlete growing up.
When her family moved to Utah in 2015, she started going to a nearby gym and gradually built up her strength through fitness classes. That eventually led to rock climbing. She fell in love with the problem-solving aspect of the sport, overcoming one obstacle after another.
Not long after that, while at the gym, a surprising thought popped into her head: Try out for “American Ninja Warrior.”
“I just kind of brushed it away,” Paige told me in July after her most recent appearance on “ANW” aired. “But I’ve just learned in my life that God is really persistent with me, and if I ignore him, then he will keep telling me the same thing until I listen.”
So when the thought kept coming back, she filmed an audition video.
“As I went to start, all of a sudden I felt my son, who had passed away, and I felt him say, ‘Let’s do this, Mom,’” Paige recalled. “It was totally unexpected. I didn’t anticipate to feel him there.
“But in that moment, because I felt my son with me, all that hesitation and the fear, it just left.”
After filming her video — and surprising herself by completing stunts she never imagined doing — she looked at her husband.
“Maybe I could be a ninja,” she said.
‘I needed you to become a stronger person’
Paige has now competed on “American Ninja Warrior” five times, but it wasn’t until her run this past season that the show finally gave her airtime.
For a long time, that frustrated her. But after her fourth season of competing, she felt a strong message from God that made her realize she was focusing on the wrong things.
“God was kind of like, ‘Oh wait, Jenedy, did you think this was about TV? Did you know I actually care way more about the development of an individual than I do about TV?’” she told me. “‘Look at yourself: You are a completely different person than you were four years ago, and I needed you to become a different person. I needed you to become a stronger person. This was just a path that I gave you to help you become a stronger person.’”
Physically, Paige is stronger now than she was when she started doing “American Ninja Warrior” at age 34.
In 2017, she made a New Year’s resolution to do one pullup.
In early July — just a few hours before chatting on the phone with me — she completed 19 pullups in a row.
The faith that it took to get her there has also helped her grow spiritually and mentally.
“So much of ‘Ninja’ is falling and getting up again and having the courage just to show up,” she says. “It builds you in so many ways.”
“I think one of the best things that you can do with your grief is find purpose in it.”
— Jenedy Paige
Finally getting airtime on “Ninja” this past season gave Paige the opportunity to do what she had always hoped — share her story with viewers.
“The thing with grief — and so many people have said this — is that it has layers to it, and you grieve differently in different years,“ she says. ”My son would be 17 now — I would have this big teenager, and he’s not here.
“I think one of the best things that you can do with your grief is find purpose in it.”
The timing of her “ANW” appearance this past season, Paige believes, was divinely orchestrated. The show ended up filming her run on Sept. 26, 2024 — 13 years to the day that she pulled her son out of a swimming pool.
“It just seemed like a God stamp on this whole thing,” she says.
Paige returns to “ANW” a sixth time for Season 18. She filmed her run for the upcoming season on Sept. 22 in Las Vegas.
And just a few days later, she was back in Utah, showcasing one of the biggest art projects of her career to date — one that would never have come to life had it not been for “American Ninja Warrior.”
‘Pull up’
When it comes to “American Ninja Warrior” competitors, Jessie Graff is near the top.
During the show’s eighth season, she made history by completing Stage 1 of the national finals — the furthest any woman had ever gone in the competition.
She’s a legend on the show who has been featured on billboards. She’s also a stuntwoman who has lent her physicality to blockbusters like “The Dark Knight” and “Wonder Woman 1984.”
So when Paige encountered Graff at a ninja competition in 2021, she was shocked by the impression she felt from God.
“Ask her if you can paint her.”
At that moment, Paige says, she had no idea why she would paint Graff. But as she’s been reminded over and over again throughout her life, ignoring a prompting from God is a losing battle.
So she asked. And Graff said yes.
Still not knowing what her image would be, Paige flew to Los Angeles on a Saturday and hiked 10 miles with Graff. They worked out at a ninja gym together. And then, at the gym, the painting materialized right before Paige’s eyes. As Graff did a pullup, the flexed and toned muscles in her back were on full display. Paige was in awe.
“Of course I’d want to paint that,” she thought.
The next morning, Paige woke up in her hotel room with another strong impression: In a world acted on by gravity, downward forces are acting on people at all times — both physically and spiritually.
“I need you to pull up,” she felt God tell her. “I need you to resist that downward force. And when you resist that downward pull, you get stronger, and when you get stronger, you can help lift other people.”
“I’ve never seen so much in a pullup in my life,” Paige told me.
She went on to paint Graff’s pullup — a defining piece that stands 6 feet tall.
Over the next few years, she found herself painting one inspiring woman after another.
“God just kept putting these women in my path,” she says. “And they all had incredible stories.”
Paige’s paintings develop one layer at a time, and the Strong Women Experience came about that way, too.
The concept evolved from a solo art show to a full-day interactive conference with 10 of the women Paige painted sharing their stories, followed by several strength-building activities — including “American Ninja Warrior”-esque obstacle courses, pilates and aerial silks.
Paige never imagined her event would land at the Hale Centre Theatre. With a full season of plays and musicals, the venue only hosts a handful of outside events each year.
But to the artist’s surprise, the theater was able to fit her in. There was just one day available during her preferred month of September — the 26th.
“I literally burst into tears,” Paige recalls. “That’s the day I became a strong woman. That was the day that God asked me to step up to something super hard. It feels divine, but it also feels totally coming full circle. That day that was so terrible has also become a day that’s so beautiful.”
The Strong Women Experience finally arrives
You don’t get a practice run on “American Ninja Warrior.”
You get told how the obstacles work, but you don’t actually get to navigate the course until it’s your big moment on national TV.
That’s how launching the Strong Women Experience felt for Paige. All she could do was prepare, step up to the stage and hope it went well.
She did have a major boost of confidence going into the morning of Sept. 26, though: The event was sold out.
The energy at the Strong Women Experience that morning was palpable as women started filing into the theater lobby around 8 to explore Paige’s vast collection of paintings — including the one of Kamali’i Stopper and her son that she had been finishing up just the week before.
In total, the panel length for all of Paige’s artwork spread 45 feet.
Roughly 500 people — around 30% from outside of Utah — attended the event. Inside the auditorium, in the minutes leading up to the Strong Women Experience kickoff, the woman on my left shared with me that this event couldn’t have come at a better time: Her family had recently moved to Utah after her husband lost his job.
She told me that Paige was so touched by her story that through a scholarship established for the event, her expenses for the Strong Women Experience were covered.
A visibly emotional Paige then ran out onstage and greeted the hundreds of women who came to celebrate this moment that had been a long time coming.
“The first person I want to thank is my God,” Paige said, choking up as she shared how this very day, Sept. 26, has taken on new meaning for her. “He has led me here.”
Paige’s emotion and energy set the tone for the whole conference, which, fittingly at a theater, felt more like a production.
There was entertainment — including an aerialist routine from “American Ninja Warrior” competitor Aly Larson, and performances from “Encanto” star Adassa Candiani and singer Claire Boone.
As the event moved from one speaker to the next, it often felt like a pep rally.
There were solemn moments, like when Tia Stokes recalled her harrowing cancer diagnosis that left her isolated from her family for weeks at a time as she underwent chemo during the pandemic, or when Sarah Frei Mills told of the car crash in Logan Canyon that severed her spinal cord in two different places.
But the solemn moments were fleeting.
“You can choose to be happy,” Stokes told the women in the audience. “You get to choose, how beautiful is that?”
She told everyone to write down the following statement: “It is not happy people who are grateful, it is grateful people who are happy.”
Mills, 22, shared how she accepted the grief, the loss and the trauma from the accident that paralyzed her from the waist down, and then chose to make the most of it. She got married this past summer and has landed her dream job as an elementary school teacher.
Rather than trying to do everything on her own, she said, her strength has come from asking others for help, recognizing that she can’t — and shouldn’t have to — do it all alone.
“I need people,” she said through tears.
Inspired by her daughter, Jessie Graff, Ginny MacColl stepped into a gym for the first time at the age of 63. Now, at 73, she has appeared on “American Ninja Warrior” several times and is the oldest woman to compete on the show.
“Strength is ageless,” MacColl said as she flexed and smiled for the cheering crowd at the Hale Centre Theatre.
After Boone performed Lauren Daigle’s “You Say” — the song that gave Paige comfort before she competed on “American Ninja Warrior” for the first time — Paige took the stage.
“It all just feels like a dream come true,” she said with emotion before sharing the greatest source of her strength: her faith.
“I have a firm belief that our creation process did not end when we were born, that we are all works in progress that he is continually working on if we let him.
“If you make God the focus of your life, the sure foundation that you build on, then he can do incredible things with you.”
‘Just the beginning’
Now that it’s over, Paige doesn’t know where exactly she goes from here.
As she kicked off the Strong Women Experience, she said with emotion that she believed in her heart this was “just the beginning.”
“To build muscle, it first has to be torn ... and God totally tore me. And then he put me back together. But he didn’t put me back together as I was — he put me back together stronger.”
— Jenedy Paige
At church the following Sunday, Paige flipped over a Strong Women Experience sticker to find a message from her daughter: “It’s done. But not over,” it read, as she shared in a post on Instagram.
Like many of her paintings, or competing on “American Ninja Warrior,” she believes this event is a work in progress and there’s room to grow.
She feels this so strongly, in part, because of what she’s endured to get to this point.
“To build muscle, it first has to be torn ... and God totally tore me,” she said. “And then he put me back together. But he didn’t put me back together as I was — he put me back together stronger. And when you’re stronger, you can help lift others.”
In four years, she painted 30 women who lifted her up with their own messages of faith, resilience and hope. And she’s certain that was only the beginning.
“I am confident I could spend the rest of my life telling the stories of strong women and never run out of good stories to tell,” she said.
