9/27 UPDATE: The LA Weekly has more on the twists and turns in this unfolding drama, with the most recent development suggesting October's Art Walk will in fact be happening:
The strange saga of downtown's Art Walk took another twist over the weekend as its board stated that the monthly event would be back, as scheduled Oct. 14, and that its director, Jay Lopez, was shown the door after he announced that the walk was off without the board's authorization.
"The announcement made to the media on Friday by Jay Lopez, the former director of the event, was made on his own initiative ...," the statement reads.
So is it on or off? Strangely, Lopez's statement about the event's cancellation (it was supposed to go quarterly starting in January) still stands on the Art Walk website. Is the board and Lopez still battling over control? It seems like it.
9/25 UPDATE: Confusion is swirling around yesterday's announcement on the Downtown Art Walk's official site that the monthly event had been suspended for the duration of 2010, and would be relaunched in 2011 as a quarterly, daytime event. That message remains on the site today:
September 24, 2010 (Los Angeles, CA) – The Downtown Art Walk, a downtown Los Angeles institution since 2004, has grown to become the largest regularly occurring event in the center city. In its 6 years of operation it has achieved every one of its slated objectives; re-energizing Downtown Los Angeles, establishing a downtown art gallery district, and acting as a significant economic development tool for a multitude of other neighborhood serving businesses.
In recent years the Downtown Art Walk has grown so large that it has become too costly to manage in its current form. Effective immediately the Downtown Art Walk will go on hiatus, ceasing all event operations until January 2011, at which time it will be reborn as a quarterly, weekend, daytime, gallery-focused event which will appeal to both patrons of the arts as well as the general public.
Despite what looked to be a definitive announcement, blogdowntown has amended their previous posting on the Art Walk's demise to reflect the growing confusion and finger-pointing surrounding the events future:
While the statement leaves little room for questions, many started to swirl after it was posted.
Property owner Tom Gilmore thinks the idea that the Art Walk could even be shut down is preposterous. "Somebody saying that they're going to stop Art Walk is like me saying that I'm going to shut down residential," he said this evening.
"I guarantee Art Walk will happen as usual every second Tuesday," he continued. "I think two weeks from now it's like, 'What? There was something wrong?'"
The board of the non-profit set up to manage the event has not made any statement, but board members have told blogdowntown that the release was not authorized by the group.
Developing...