I’m moving to a new apartment in Albany’s Mansion Neighborhood at the end of the month. The move was prompted by a rent increase I considered somewhat unreasonable, and at first I was annoyed, because I’m still traumatized by my move from Alabama to Albany over six years ago. Then I got to thinking, and realized this was an opportunity to move off a crowded, noisy street that has become increasingly tiresome. I like Center Square, the neighborhood where I live now, but I’ve always been intrigued by the Mansion Neighborhood. One afternoon I wandered down there, to get a feel for the place and see if I would feel comfortable living there.

Architecturally, the Mansion Neighborhood is interesting, but that’s no surprise, given Albany’s great housing stock — Center Square has interesting architecture, too. What attracted me to the neighborhood were the things Center Square doesn’t have, namely farm animals and art. Center Square has art, of course. In galleries, and the shops that transform into galleries for First Friday. But the Mansion Neighborhood has art outside, public art on the streets and sidewalks and walls, and you can see it if you walk around. Some of these pieces were done by Chris Stain, an artist who lived in Albany for awhile but has since relocated to Brooklyn.

I interviewed Chris Stain a few years ago, for an article about his friend Josh MacPhee, a stencil artist who lives in Troy. MacPhee is an expert on political graffiti and stencil art, and runs Justseeds, an artists’ cooperative that sells inexpensive prints, silkscreens and posters on-line. I read his book, “Stencil Pirates,” a visual history of the street stencil, while researching the article, and I began to appreciate stencil art. The straight lines, bold colors, and often gritty images of urban life appealed to me. I liked the idea that this art was accessible and public. You didn’t have to go to a museum to see it. And it was cheap.

I discovered just how cheap when I went to see a shadow puppet production put on by one of MacPhee’s friends. This production took place in a chilly building in downtown Troy. I don’t think I even took off my coat. But the production was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, a surrealistic series of scenes and images featuring elegantly cut stencils of butterflies and ships and birds on a small, illuminated screen. After the show, puppeteer Erik Ruin unfurled a collection of posters and announced that they could be purchased for a minimum of $10. I paged through the pile, and said I would buy a print filled with black lines, dark blues and reds, and a quote by the playwright Brecht running through the panels. I handed over the $10 in my wallet.

The art spent the next several months lying on my kitchen table, and the more I looked at it, the more I grew to love it. It’s going to be a long time before I can walk into a gallery and purchase a piece of art, because it’s tough for people who aren’t wealthy to buy and collect art. That’s why it was nice to discover a group of radical artists who believed in selling art on the cheap and making it available to everyone. This philosophy dovetailed nicely with my own lack of wealth. Even better, I liked their art. Eventually, I decided my new print needed a nice frame, and a place on my wall. Nice frames are expensive, and I wondered if there was any way to frame it without spending several hundred dollars. Finally, I asked a friend if he could make a frame. A few weeks later, he presented my art in a beautiful, knotty frame made out of a piece of mahogany.

I often glance at Justseeds.org to see what’s available. Most of the posters are overtly political. Interesting stuff, but not, for the most part, anything I want hanging permanently on my wall. (I don’t need a stencil tribute to the Zapatistas in my home.) Recently, though, I saw a piece by MacPhee that I really liked: a 19 by 25 inch silkscreen print of dark red bricks floating through a bright blue sky. (In a comment next to the print, MacPhee simply wrote, “I’m infatuated by bricks, especially flying ones.”) It only cost $20, and so I bought it. It arrived in the mail in a poster tube a few days later, and for the next couple months it sat on my kitchen table, waiting for me to make some kind of decision about how to display it.

I’m sort of lazy, so the poster might have sat on my kitchen table for even longer than that if I hadn’t decided to move. As I contemplated whether I could live in the apartment I eventually chose, I imagined how it would look with my books and CDs lining the walls, and my art hanging up. It was only when I imagined the Ruin print and the flying bricks there that I really became enthusiastic about the apartment. This weekend I stopped at a frame shop in Lake Luzerne recommended by a friend and picked out matting and the wood for the frame. It will be a few weeks before I get my art back, but I can’t wait to hang it up. I like having art around, and I’m hoping the Mansion Neighborhood affords me the opportunity to discover even more.