Thornton Dial, Sr. (b. 1928) is probably the best known of all living “outsider” artists, and has “crossed over” into other art markets.  He is a distinguished internationally known artist, whose work appeared in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and at The New Museum in New York.  He only began seriously making art after his retirement. Dial worked for the Pullman Standard Company building railroad box cars for thirty years. He also painted and created assemblages.  However, he didn’t realize what he was doing was making art, and for years he buried the pieces in his yard because he was afraid his neighbors would think he was crazy.  When he retired from the Pullman Company, Dial and two of his sons started a small metal furniture company, but they all gradually became more involved in making works of art.  His art functions like folk tales, combining African and American traditions to tell stories that are at once personal, political, and spiritual.  The tiger often appears in Dial’s art, as it does in “Tiger Will.” Gerald Wertkin who produced a book on Dial’s art commented that the tiger in Dial’s art “represents the black man – either in the jungle or, more frequently, as taken out of the jungle, sold into slavery, and struggling to survive and assert himself in an alien milieu.”  See Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger (Harry Abrams, Inc. 1993) at 17.  Dial himself says, “If a man going to travel, he got to be a tiger.  The tigers are tackling things, struggling for their life.”  Women also appear frequently in Dial’s paintings, often paired with animals, as in “Lady and the Long Neck” symbolizing various aspects of male-female relationships, and according to Wertkin, a recurrent theme in Dial’s work is “that the American women’s primary goal is the achievement of equality.”  Id. at 82.