Sam Gilliam—the D.C.-based painter famous for his colorful, draped artwork and his association with the Washington Color School—will be the subject of a major retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in spring 2022. It will be the first American museum retrospective of the artist in more than 15 years.

The exhibition will burst with color: It will include pieces like “Light Depth,” a 1969 abstract work in which Gilliam disregarded the traditional reliance on a frame and draped a large swath of painted fabric from a wall, and “Ruby Light,” a 1972 acrylic that likewise protrudes out from the wall toward the viewer.

The 86-year-old is experiencing something of a renaissance:  His draped compositions from the late 1960s and early ’70s have become iconic, and leading fine art museums like MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have acquired his work. Gilliam has a large public work at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

And yet, despite his years of groundbreaking work, Gilliam is not a household name. Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu hopes the retrospective will help further solidify Gilliam’s place in art history.

“This overdue, in-depth survey builds on our museum’s mission: to showcase the most important local, national and international artists of our time,” Chiu said in a statement. “Gilliam’s influence spans these three realms. There is no more fitting place to celebrate his contribution to our understanding of abstraction than on the National Mall in his chosen hometown of Washington, D.C., at the national museum of modern art.”

Gilliam works out of a gas station-turned-artist’s studio in Northwest D.C. He was born in Tupelo, Miss., in 1933 and moved to the city in 1962, when he started working with a group of abstract painters known as the Washington Color School. The artists created deceptively simple compositions that explored the concept of putting “pure color” onto a canvas to create an intense and direct visual experience for viewers.

But seen holistically, Gilliam’s work defies categorization. Throughout his decades-long career, he has employed painting, sculpture and mixed media to explore color relationships and redefine the relationship between art and wall.

The Hirshhorn previously took over Washingtonians’ Instagram accounts with its 2017 retrospective of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Works from that exhibition, Infinity Mirrors, will return to the museum sometime this year.