At age 12, he knocked on a neighbor's door to sell newspapers and saw works of art lining the walls of the house.
[5] As Grigsby fell in love with painting, his mother was accepting of it immediately, but his father did not believe he could make a living as a painter and was skeptical.
[6] He attended Johnson C. Smith University for one year and transferred to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia to finish his Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Additionally, he studied at the American Artists School in New York and Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles, France.
[12] As an educator Grigsby was known for encouraging students to use their cultural heritage to understand their own identities and to inform their art practice.
He attributes his involvement to his experiences working for three months teaching art at the American Pavilion at the World's Fair in Brussels in 1958.
[13] One of the ways he did this was through the founding of COBA (Consortium of Black Artists and Others for the Arts) which puts on an invitational exhibition of work from inner-city high school students in Phoenix annually and brings in a prominent African American artist to the Phoenix region every two years among other community supported programs.