A new report co-published by the City and Documented highlights how a key advisor to New York City Mayor Eric Adams during his time as Brooklyn’s borough president reportedly attempted to orchestrate an exhibition with an absurd turnaround time at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016. The information came to light amid growing scrutiny of the mayoral administration after Adams was indicted on federal corruption charges last month, following two years of various FBI raids investigating his foreign travel and campaign funding.
Winnie Greco, a key liaison between Adams and New York City’s diasporic Chinese constituents for the last decade, was initially an unpaid volunteer and adept fundraiser throughout Adams’s time as Brooklyn borough president. She later joined the city government’s payroll with a six-figure salary as the director of Asian Affairs upon Adams’s mayoral inauguration in January 2022.
The City and Documented‘s co-report credits Greco with developing the close relationship between the Chinese Consul General in Manhattan and Borough Hall, pointing out how she facilitated an 11-day trip to China for Adams and other city staffers in 2014 through a nonprofit she founded, as well as coordinated various meetings and event invitations between Adams and Consul General officials.
The report’s findings also zoom in on an instance in which Greco, on behalf of a delegation from the Overseas Chinese History Museum of China, submitted an eleventh-hour pitch for an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum with a month-long turnaround time in 2016.
The exhibition, which Greco proposed for the museum’s European galleries, was meant to center Sun Yat-sen, a political philosopher and Chinese revolutionary who served as the Republic of China’s first provisional president in 1912 — Greco described him as the “leader of China’s republican revolution.”
When the Brooklyn Museum reportedly underscored the impossibility of the requested timeline, then-Chief Mayoral Advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin emailed the institution’s Director Anne Pasternak directly to “ensure that the museum was fully aware of Borough Hall’s interest in supporting the request, if it were possible.”
Pasternak reportedly responded that the European galleries were occupied, and that “no museum can not [sic] turn around an exhibition in one month,” noting that it usually takes a minimum of two to three years for an institutional show to come together.
Nevertheless, according to the City, Greco’s proposed exhibition opened at the Brooklyn Borough Hall only a month after Pasternak’s email exchange with Lewis-Martin.
The Brooklyn Museum did not immediately respond to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment.
This year, the FBI raided both of Greco’s homes in the Bronx at the end of February in connection with the probes into Adams’s campaign fundraising and travel, and the focus and findings of said raids remain unclear. Greco was on unpaid leave for two months before returning to work under the “direct supervision” of the commissioner of the Community Affairs Unit, according to the City.
