Bill Scheele: At Kokoon Arts Gallery.

Every generation claims its watershed moments. Some may have more gravitas than others, but all share an epic, cinematic quality in the collective memory. The August 1969 Woodstock Festival wasn't Omaha Beach. But it's just as famous, and as everyone knows it gave a moment of transcendent identity to a generation that didn't want to be the heroes of a bad little war in Southeast Asia. It was hard to believe even at the time, but a virtual army of 500,000 mud-stained hippies, draft-dodgers, musicians and just plain people straggled over the hills near the tiny hamlet of Bethel, New York to listen to Jimi and Janis on those rainy late-summer days. The promoters, who knew a film set when they saw one, quickly sold the movie rights.

As it happens, Cleveland gallery director William Scheele, who had just turned 21 at the time, had a privileged view of the scene. In 1968 Scheele was enrolled in the school of art at Case Western Reserve University, but there were other winds a-blowin' and like the song said, you didn't need to be a weatherman. College could wait.

"I went out to LA to work for the Band," says Scheele, who at this stage of his life manages to look distinguished, artistic and slightly renegade all at once, a mixture of Alfred Stieglitz and Sam Elliott: "This was at the invitation of my friend Jon Taplin. From that point on I became their stage and prop manager. The first concert I set up was in San Francisco. The Band had already been together for 10 years by then; these were totally laid-back, humble guys."

It was the beginning of a busy year, for Scheele, and for the hagiography of rock 'n' roll. The Band debuted as such at the Winterland Ballroom back in San Francisco in April, then flew to New York for a Fillmore East concert in May, followed by the Toronto Pop Festival in June. "Soon after that Bob Dylan came and played with us near St. Louis, across the river in Edwardsville, Illinois."

Scheele was to see a lot more of Dylan during the next six years. He shows me an album of black and white photos, many of which he took himself. The five instantly recognizable (if you're of a certain age) faces are pictured in various combinations jamming or lounging: the great Garth Hudson and Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and singer Richard Manuel. Other pictures feature Janis Joplin laughing on a tour bus, and of course, Bob Dylan, looking a little like Kate Winslet. Scheele is there too in many of them, as skinny and hip as the rest, like a time traveler who'd just been talking with John Wesley Hardin.

The first Isle of Wight Folk Festival followed hard on the heels of Woodstock later that same August. "George Harrison was our host," Scheele remembers. "We found this complex of ancient stone farm buildings out in the wilds there, and set up one of them as a studio. The Beatles and the Stones came by..." And the whirlwind of musical activity went on and on, through the mammoth Watkins Glen concert that attracted an estimated 650,000 fans in the summer of 1973, looping back and forth from venue to venue on both sides of the Atlantic.

Scheele finally returned to Cleveland in 1976. Notoriously, the Band was a hard act to follow. But the main passions of Scheele's life are really art and technology, nature and history. In 1984 he launched the Cleveland Artists Foundation, and has gone on to operate several galleries and arts organizations, both profit and not for profit, including the current Kokoon Arts Gallery in Cleveland's Gordon Square district. His father, William E. Scheele, was director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History from 1949 through 1972. Both he and his wife Joann were talented artists in their own right who had studied with the principal figures of the Cleveland School. In 1988 Scheele opened his first commercial gallery, Scheele Fine Art, exhibiting both classic area artists and contemporaries like the widely admired ceramicist and sculptor Gary Spinosa. A decade or so later he founded and directed NewCAT (the New Center for Art and Technology), an organization devoted to the development and exhibition of computer-based art. NewCAT contributed internationally recognized digital art to Cleveland's recent Ingenuity Festivals.

"Tiger in Storm": Watercolor by Paul Travis, 1955.

These days, Scheele's project and haven is the Kokoon Arts Gallery, tucked into several rooms on the second floor of the former American Greetings Factory off West 78th Street, now called the Creative Arts Building. It's a lavishly interesting environment sandwiching past, present and future. The name derives from the Kokoon Arts Clubs, a festive cabal celebrating proto-modernist ideals founded by William Sommer and others in 1911. In the main space a wall of large Paul Travis watercolors depicts exotic landscapes, thrumming with active, calligraphic line and tropical colors. Just beyond these, hung on a gently curving pierced steel screen-like wall, a subtle computer-design textile by Kent Sate University's Janet Lessman Moss hangs like a sacred moment in mathematics. Kokoon is a showcase for a variety of contemporary works in media ranging from computer graphics to ceramic sculpture.

But the tightest focus is on the past. In another room across the hall, a number of small paintings by Frank Wilcox depict the American West with boldly optimistic simplicity. Many of these artists were travelers - Travis made a life-altering journey across Africa in 1928, for example, and a vibrant exoticism is counterbalanced here by rust-belt realism from such painters as Frank Wilcox. Scheele, who has enjoyed a life-long relationship with the friends and families of these men and women, says with real passion, "I want to continue showing Cleveland School work - because they were Cleveland masters, they really were. They deserve instant recognition."

The Gallery is open intermittently and by appointment. A good time to check it out is this Saturday, Jan. 26, when the studios, galleries and other businesses at the Creative Arts Building hold an open house from 1-6 p.m. Also participating will be several other major Cleveland galleries including Tregoning Fine Art, Kenneth Pat Lesko Gallery and the studios of several major Cleveland-based artists.

Kokoon Arts Gallery: 1305 W. 80th St., Cleveland.