Sonali Menezes is a prolific Hamilton artist. She is the creator of Zine Club, author of Depression Cooking, an exhibiting artist and occasional drag king who has been making zines — small-run, self-published magazines — for more than a decade.
She is heavily inspired by their use as protest art. So when a problem arose in her daily life that she says felt difficult to address, she turned to the art form for help.
In December 2022, Menezes and her husband moved into Lamoreaux Gardens, a Hamilton apartment complex owned by Skyview Living, which, according to the company’s website, manages approximately 1,200 rental units across southern Ontario. This marked the beginning of a long series of pest and maintenance issues the couple says they faced while living in the unit. Menezes says these issues started on the first night, when they found cockroaches in their kitchen. Leaky taps, incorrect bathroom fixtures, a broken kitchen drawer and mould followed, she tells CBC Arts.
“At the time, there was a resident manager who was living on site … and at the beginning we notified him [about the cockroaches],” she says. “We immediately had to prep our unit [for treatment].… When we returned, there was no evidence that the unit had been treated, and the problem persisted. We kept complaining, and then we would have to pack everything back up again. They would say the place would be sprayed, but again, there was no evidence of a dust treatment or a spraying.”
A year into living in the unit, the couple says they received a notification the landlord had applied to the Landlord and Tenant Board for an above-guideline rent increase (representing an increase of 5.5 per cent when the provincial guideline was 2.5 per cent). This prompted the duo to take action; Menezes suggested creating a zine.
Zines as protest art
Calling upon her research on the history of zines as a protest tool, the artist and her husband began organizing tenants for collective action. Menezes originally discovered the art form while studying at the University of Guelph, where she was involved in several progressive organizations on campus that maintained zine libraries for students.
“The first zine fair I came to was actually in Hamilton in 2014, the Hamilton Feminist Zine Fair, and I sold my own zines there,” says Menezes. “A poet from Guelph, Lisa Baird, came to the Feminist Zine Fair, and she told me, ‘Sonali, I love your poetry!’ I was like, ‘Lisa, I’m not writing poetry.’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, you are!’ So zines sort of turn a lot of people into poets, into writers, into cooks, academics, and you don’t even realize it because you’re engaging in this very immediate form that spills over into other categories.”
Menezes says that after knocking on doors and learning that many tenants were living in similar or worse conditions, she and her husband began flyering the buildings. She says that they attracted 25 people to a park and invited the tenant union, ACORN Hamilton. The attendees agreed to form a tenant association, Menezes says. The artist created marketing materials for the group and was offered a meeting space at the Staircase, a local theatre.
The tenant association discovered that many Lamoreaux Gardens residents felt “burnt out” from work and apartment stresses, says Menezes, so the association wanted to create a plan that wouldn’t further deplete them. The artist proposed a zine as a low-effort action for tenants. The residents would only need to share images of issues in their apartment building and Menezes would assemble the final product. The photos she says she collected from tenants — which would be published anonymously — showed bed bug and cockroach infestations, leaking pipes, cracked tiles and overflowing garbage.
After the zine, titled Welcome to Lamoreaux Gardens, was created, Menezes says she sent daily copies to Skyview Living for months. The tenant association opened an Instagram account and shared the project in a neighbourhood Facebook group, which Menezes says attracted some community members who volunteered to canvas more tenants.
CBC Arts reached out to Skyview Living in June for comment regarding the allegations contained in the zine and shared in this article, but did not receive a response.
A sense of solidarity among tenants
Sarah Alleyne moved into Lamoreaux Gardens in April 2020. Eight months after moving in, a hot water pipe burst beneath her floorboards, she says.
“The floors started warping,” says Alleyne. “I let Skyview know. The superintendent at the time said that the floors were just going to be replaced at that point, because they looked terrible. It took them about a year — maybe a year and a half — to finally even come into the apartment and look at it. Then all they did was just hammer it back in place. When I inquired recently with the last superintendent, I said I wanted the floors completely replaced. He said that he spoke with his property manager, who said that they were going to replace the floors if I moved out.”
Alleyne, who stills lives in Lamoreaux Gardens, believes that the creation of both the association and the zine has helped build confidence and a sense of solidarity among tenants. “It’s been a huge impact,” she says. “You go from [thinking] you have to deal with this by yourself to ‘OK, there are other people who are dealing with this.’ It’s also a bit of a therapy session that we go to once a month to vent.”
Neither Menezes or Alleyne filed complaints with the Landlord and Tenant Board, each citing a long backlog for hearings. Instead, both say they’ve filed complaints about the maintenance of their apartments with City of Hamilton bylaw services.
Madina Meghani, another current Lamoreaux Gardens tenant, believes this collective organizing allows tenants to build power with their neighbours. “After pressure from the tenant association for creating the zine, the tenants celebrated our first concrete victory: a resident manager was finally hired,” says Meghani. “Together, we can force landlords to maintain our buildings and organize towards better living conditions for all.”
Menezes and her husband moved out of Lamoreaux Gardens in February 2026. She says the daily mailing campaign has since stopped, but the artist is still a lead organizer with the tenant association. And she too sees the zine as a success. “I think it gave tenants the power to warn other people to not be put in a vulnerable situation.”
‘Zines are for everyone’
Inspired by her love of zines, Menezes and artist Mariel Rutherford established Zine Club in January 2019. Hosted at the Hamilton Public Library Central branch, the art club is a relaxed, drop-in environment for longtime zinesters, newbies and everyone in between to create, trade, socialize and share upcoming zine-related events.
Maisie Bee, artist and Zine Club facilitator, says they were attracted to the club as a queer-friendly space, accessible to everyone, which gathers local artists working on interesting projects.
“Some of my favourite zines — and a lot of zine history — come from protest,” says Bee. “The very first zine ever created … would’ve been in the 1920s. It’s called Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, and this was a zine of essays, fiction, illustrations and such, created by Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes [and others]. It was pretty much about the struggles of the Black community living in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. That was, in my opinion, the start of zine culture.”
One of Menezes’ favourite historical zines is a booklet on union organizing in Hamilton.
“I love to talk about Union Light, which was produced in Hamilton in the ’30s in connection to the unionization of Westinghouse [Electric Corporation], by someone named Bert McClure, who was a communist and was involved in unionizing efforts there,” Menezes says. “Bert was distributing it amongst workers, and actually was arrested for distributing them.”
Menezes believes that zine-making is a uniquely accessible art form, one that has the power to mould hidden artists via the process of creation.
“Zines are for everyone,” she says. “A lot of people make zines who don’t consider themselves artists. I put together this zine from photographs from tenants. None of the contributing tenants would consider themselves artists, but they’re contributors to a zine. If you have an interest in making a zine or an interest in zine culture, and you want to try it out, you don’t have to be an artist — but you can come to Zine Club if you want to learn how to do it.”
