There are institutions, and then there are institutions. The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum — sandstone, cathedral-grand, sitting in Glasgow's West End like it was placed there by someone who wanted the city to feel proud of itself — will from June 2027 house something it has arguably always deserved: a full exhibition dedicated to Sir Billy Connolly. The man himself made the announcement on Instagram, characteristically direct, calling Kelvingrove somewhere "very dear to my heart." That phrase lands heavier than it might appear.

Connolly grew up in Partick, within walking distance of Kelvingrove. He was not born into a world that handed men like him gallery space. He was born into post-war Glasgow tenement life, raised partly by an aunt and uncle after his mother left, doing his time in the shipyards before stand-up comedy became his unlikely escape route and then his life's work. The fact that a boy from that Glasgow ends up the subject of a major exhibition in that building is, by any honest reckoning, a story worth telling at scale.

The exhibition, titled Billy Connolly's Big Wee Exhibition, will cover his life, his comedy, and — crucially — his clothes. The clothes are not a trivial detail. Connolly's visual identity became as much a part of his persona as his voice: the banana boots, the outrageous stage outfits, the deliberate rejection of the conservative dress codes of the working-class world he came from and the showbiz world he crashed into. His wardrobe was always a statement, and displaying it in a museum context asks the audience to take seriously what mainstream culture spent years treating as eccentric spectacle.

Connolly has been living with Parkinson's disease since his diagnosis became public in 2013. He has spoken with characteristic frankness about its progression and about what it has taken from him — the physicality of performance chief among them. He no longer tours. The exhibition, in that light, is not just a celebration; it carries the weight of a reckoning with legacy, the kind an artist undertakes when the body sets its own terms. That context should not be sentimentalised, but it should not be ignored either.

Earlier this year Connolly recorded an audio guide for Kelvingrove — his voice walking visitors through twelve works in the permanent collection, attaching his own memories and associations to them. It was a quiet, generous act, and it seeded the ground for what is now confirmed as something much larger. The relationship between Connolly and this particular building clearly runs deeper than a one-off commission.

Glasgow has had a complicated relationship with its own cultural exports. The city can be fiercely proud and simultaneously reluctant to make the institutional gestures that match that pride. Connolly spent much of his adult life outside Scotland — in London, in New York, eventually in the Florida Keys — and the distance was not always purely geographical. He has spoken plainly about the ambivalence some corners of Scotland directed at success that looked like departure. An exhibition of this scale, in this venue, is the city saying something unambiguous, and saying it while Connolly is still here to receive it.

What the exhibition will actually look like in curatorial terms — how it handles the difficult early biography, whether it engages with the political Connolly who skewered nationalism and religion with equal enthusiasm, how it presents the comedy itself rather than simply the comedian — remains to be seen. Museum exhibitions about living comedians risk becoming hagiography. The tension between reverence and the irreverence that defines the subject will be the curatorial challenge worth watching.

For now, the announcement is enough to note plainly: one of the most significant comic voices the British Isles produced in the twentieth century is getting a proper homecoming, in the city that built him, in a building that has always punched above its postcode. June 2027. Mark it.