Down from the staircase of the High Line at 20th street and 10th Avenue, the sun and flowers disappeared, and a crowded lot with multilevel car parking system takes you to a distinctive feeling of Chelsea -- industrially artsy. West of the stairs, the road is in construction, and graffiti emerges on white architectures. Here is the home to some of the most famous art houses in the city, including Jonathan Levine Gallery.

The freight elevator stops at the ninth floor. Across from the glass door, Belgian graffiti artist ROA turned the gallery to his canvas. In the past two months, instead of travelling around the world and covering surfaces of buildings with portrayals of wild animals -- his specializes in painting animals, ROA prepared for his solo exhibition Metazoa in a studio, building 12 movable sculptures made of discarded cabinets and scraps of wood he found in New York and New Jersey, and brought his animal kingdom to the mainstream art world.

The most expensive installation of three beavers, the state animal of New York - the skeleton, flesh and veins of the beavers are shown as you interact with the panels - marked as $17,000 on the pamphlet at the front desk. Within three weeks, five works have been sold. Some were purchased by the regular collectors of the gallery and the rest by ROA's fans. (**I will go again on the closing day - This Saturday, May 2 - to update the number.)

ROA is one of the many Graffiti artists who have shown in Jonathan Levine Gallery, an institution with the mission to represent generation cultural shifts. According to Caleb Neelon, a American graffiti artist and book author who has shown his pieces at the gallery, though "his heart is always in painting outside for real public and not the self-selecting public that goes to museums of galleries", he loves gallery exhibitions for "the chance to make work more slowly and to do things one simply cannot do in the street."

From vandalism to commercial tools, Graffiti is now recognized as a form of fine art. Artists are being invited to the mainstream art world by museums and galleries, by people who have fought for decades for the status of Graffiti. Mainstream media has also discovered the influence of the phenomenon.

On April 2, The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith reviewed another Graffiti artist’s exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, opened a day before ROA’s Metazoa. “Language was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first artistic language. The words he deftly spray-painted on the walls and buildings of downtown New York in the late 1970s and early ‘80s…were unlike any other graffiti of the time,” Smith wrote at the beginning of the review, acknowledging the graffiti background of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s. Though the show is about his Basquiat’s notebooks and arts on canvas, Smith was aware of the influence of graffiti writings on his later works. In 2013, the hammer came down at $48.8 million for a Basquiat’s painting, Dustheads, at Christie’s auction.

Basquiat is one of the earliest graffiti artists who made into the mainstream art world – another very famous artist was Keith Haring, the father of the “Radiant Baby”. Modern graffiti began in Philadelphia in the 1960s, and shifted to the New York City in early 1970s, when Graffiti writers started to tag the subway trains, and then spread to the ground. Basquiat began his career with spraying on building on the Lower East Side in the late 1970s; Haring, a student at the School of Visual Arts at the same time, was inspired by the graffiti he saw in the subways, and started drawing his cartoon-ish works on the advertisement panels in the subway stations.

WIn 1980, artists John Ahearn and Tom Otterness curated the now legendary “Times Square Show” in an abandoned massage parlor. Basquiat and Haring was invited to show their works. FUN Gallery, the first of its kind opened in 1981 to honor graffiti and downtown art culture. There, the innovative artists built on the inspirations from the street and created paintings on canvas. To promote their show, curators and artists put stickers around the city, and distributed thousands of postcards.

With the stock market crash of October 19, 1987 and the permanently clean of subway trains in May of 1989 came the low point of graffiti. It faded from the fine art market, especially in the New York City. It’s not until early 2000s when artists like Shepard Fairey, Banksy and Swoon made their names known in the mainstream art world that the Graffiti welcomed its revival.

The New York Times made a video “From Street Art to High Art” of Swoon, a female graffiti artist who worked her way from painting by trespassing to exhibiting in Museum of Modern Art. Shepard Fairey, the artist behind the 2008 Barack Obama HOPE poster, built his reputation on creating graphical works before finally earning the right to a DUMBO wall ¬– to do street art. British artist Banksy combined his talent in graffiti with media to engage the public, and achieved as the most successful Graffiti artist – his work was sold for 1.87 million at a Sotheby’s auction.

The value of Graffiti is rising in the art world. In 2011, Museum of Contemporary Art opened a three-month show Art in the Streets, the first major museum exhibition of the history of graffiti and street art from the 1970s to the global movement it has become today. The show travelled to the Brooklyn Museum afterward. In 2013, Museum of the City of New York announced she exhibition City as Canvas, Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection includes over 150 works on canvas and other media, along with photographs of graffiti writing long erased from subways and buildings.

These shows promoted the status of graffiti, but also generated heated discussions. The mini freight train cars – with graffiti painted on each side of the trains - showed at Art in the Streets were once made into toys selling at Walmart and Urban Outfitters, but were discontinued when being accused of glorifying graffiti. Last year, The New York Times opened its “Room for Debate” of the opinion page on the topic “When Does Graffiti Become Street Art?”, inviting authors and artists elaborate on the topic. Overall, numbers of articles that mentioned the word graffiti increased drastically over the past decades. 248 pieces mentioned “graffiti” and “art” in the past 12 months. The rising influence is phenomenal.

These shows promoted the status of graffiti, but also generated heated discussions. The mini freight train cars – with graffiti painted on each side of the trains - showed at Art in the Streets were once made into toys selling at Walmart and Urban Outfitters, but were discontinued when being accused of glorifying graffiti. Last year, The New York Times opened its “Room for Debate” of the opinion page on the topic “When Does Graffiti Become Street Art?”, inviting authors and artists elaborate on the topic. Overall, numbers of articles that mentioned the word graffiti increased drastically over the past decades. 248 pieces mentioned “graffiti” and “art” in the past 12 months. The rising influence is phenomenal.

Graffiti is also growing rapidly as an art form. Neelon, who pursued a master’s of education degree from Harvard and worked on books to educate the public on graffiti, is currently creating street murals in Sarajevo to promote peace. “I'm almost 39 years old and have been involved in graffiti for 25 years now, but me and every other artist my age has on average another 35 years left in their careers and nobody feels like slowing down. Things will keep moving.”