A look at the documented record — four official notices, three different stated reasons, and an open question about what’s really going on

For over a decade, Venus International Productions (VIP), led by founder Urbain Richard, built the Haitian Labor Day Fest into one of the signature dates on New York’s Haitian cultural calendar — a Konpa-driven answer to the broader West Indian Carnival weekend, drawing major bands to a dedicated Haitian celebration. As recently as September 3, 2023, the festival ran as planned at Coney Island Amphitheater. What’s happened since then, based on Venus Productions’ own public communications, is a documented pattern worth laying out plainly.

The Record, in the Company’s Own Words

August 12, 2024: Venus Int’l Productions and the Haitian Labor Day Fest organizing committee announced the 2024 festival would not happen, framing it as a postponement rather than a cancellation. The release cited “a variety of factors,” specifically naming “issues with the venue,” and committed to returning “with a renewed spirit and a bigger impact” on a rescheduled date of Sunday, August 31, 2025.

Fall 2024, separately: A planned Kdilak & Bedjine album release party, originally scheduled for November 9, 2024 at Melrose Ballroom, was also postponed — this time, according to VIP’s notice, due to newly imposed “restrictions on out-of-state travel for the artist” tied to unspecified “recent legalities,” pushing the event to December 28, 2024.

August 20, 2025: The rescheduled Haitian Labor Day Fest — the one promised as a bigger, stronger return in the 2024 notice — was itself cancelled, this time attributed to the NYPD’s last-minute refusal to issue a mandatory Sound Ordinance permit. This notice promised full refunds to ticket holders and committed to “come back stronger for the 2026 edition.”

A related internal notice to bands and managers, also from Venus Productions, delivered the same 2025 cancellation news directly to performing artists’ teams, again citing the NYPD permit refusal, and noted that “further details, including a Protocole d’Accord regarding deposits already received,” would follow — indicating the company had already collected artist deposits ahead of the cancelled event.

What This Pattern Actually Shows

Laid end to end, this is a genuinely unusual run for an event with the Haitian Labor Day Fest’s history and stature: two consecutive annual editions (2024 and 2025) failed to happen as planned, following at least one other event postponement (the November 2024 album release party) in the same window. Three separate cancellation notices across roughly 12 months, citing three different official reasons — a venue issue, an artist travel restriction tied to unspecified legal matters, and a police permitting refusal — is worth noting simply as a pattern, independent of any single explanation.

It’s important to be precise about what can and can’t be concluded from this record alone. None of Venus Productions’ own public statements cite financial difficulty as a reason for any of these postponements or cancellations. Each notice points to an external, situational cause: venue availability, an artist’s legal/travel situation, and a city permitting decision. Attributing the underlying cause to the company’s finances — rather than the stated reasons — would be speculation this documentary record doesn’t itself support.

That said, the pattern is fair to flag as the kind of thing that invites scrutiny, for a few reasons that don’t require assuming any particular cause:

  • A “protocole d’accord regarding deposits already received” following the 2025 cancellation confirms Venus had collected money from booked artists before the event fell through — meaning any organization in this position faces real, concrete financial obligations (refunds to ticket holders, settlements with artists) regardless of why the event didn’t happen.
  • Three disruptions in roughly two years is a materially different track record than the festival’s earlier history, when the 2023 edition proceeded at Coney Island Amphitheater as scheduled.
  • Whether Venus Productions’ public communications channels have gone quiet since 2022 shows a mixed picture depending on which account is examined. Urbain Richard’s personal Facebook profile — which lists him as living in New York, New York — shows its most recent visible status update dated August 29, 2022, based on a direct screenshot of the profile reviewed for this report, suggesting minimal personal activity there for roughly three years. That stands in contrast to the Venus Productions brand’s Instagram account (@venusprods), which remains active with a substantial historical post count (nearly 4,000 posts) and a current bio listing both a “Founder” and a separately named “President” — a distinction worth noting, since it could indicate a shift in day-to-day operational leadership away from Richard personally, even if the Venus Productions brand itself continues posting. Whether that Instagram activity reflects genuinely recent, ongoing promotion or a dormant account with an unchanged bio was not independently confirmed for this report.

The Open Question

What connects a venue dispute, an artist’s travel restriction, a denied police permit, and a promoter’s own personal social media presence going largely quiet since August 2022 is not self-evident from the documents alone — they could be several genuinely unrelated, external obstacles that happened to land in the same period, alongside a personal shift toward lower public visibility that has any number of ordinary explanations. Or they could be downstream symptoms of a harder underlying strain (cash flow, vendor relationships, or organizational capacity) that the company’s public messaging, understandably, would not disclose in a customer-facing cancellation notice. Both readings remain consistent with the public record as it stands. What is not speculative is the record itself: an event that ran successfully in 2023 has now been disrupted in some form in both 2024 and 2025, by the company’s own account, for three different stated reasons, during the same window in which the founder’s personal public presence markedly declined — a convergence significant enough to warrant continued attention regardless of its ultimate cause.

Sources: Venus International Productions / M.I.A. Media official press releases (August 12, 2024; Fall 2024; August 20, 2025); internal Venus Productions notice to performing artists (2025); Facebook event listing for Haitian Labor Day Fest at Coney Island Amphitheater (September 3, 2023); Urbain Richard’s personal Facebook profile (reviewed directly); Instagram (@venusprods). This report distinguishes documented statements from inference throughout and does not assert an unconfirmed cause for the pattern described.