For $14.50, you can own one of Governor Cuomo’s ‘New York Tough’ posters
Section of the poster, courtesy of the Governor’s Office
The term Cuomosexual has gone as far as to make it into the Urban Dictionary. But if watching Randy Rainbow sing about the New York governor’s COVID-era following is not enough to satiate your Cuomo fix, you can personally own one of his creative albeit interesting “New York Tough” posters. Governor Cuomo revealed the piece, meant to evoke the turn-of-the-century poster art that he’s so fond of, in his press conference yesterday; it’s available for pre-order for $14.50. The poster depicts the coronavirus mountain that the state scaled and came down, with illustrations of everything from a nose swab test to his press briefing team to his daughter’s boyfriend who briefly quarantined with the family. Oh yeah, and Donald Trump is featured as “the man in the moon.”
“I love history. I love poster art. Poster art is something they did in the early 1900s, late 1800s, when they had to communicate their whole platform on one piece of paper. Over the past few years, I’ve done my own posters that capture that feeling. I did a new one for what we went through with COVID and I think the general shape is familiar to you. We went up the mountain, we curved the mountain, we came down the other side and these are little telltale signs that, to me, represent what was going on,” said the governor.
The Sea of Division. The Boyfriend Cliff. The Sun On The Other Side. See it all for yourself.
Pre-order the #NewYorkTough poster here:
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) July 14, 2020
Cuomo announced that the posters would be for sale in a cheeky Tweet last night.
We do like the boyfriend. All boyfriends face a steep climb. https://t.co/y7HBhnxcrx
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) July 13, 2020
On the subject of “the boyfriend,” even Chrissy Teigen has been following.
Later that night, during an appearance on the Tonight Show, he said to Jimmy Fallon:
Remember every day in those briefings the number of cases kept going up and up and up and up and you didn’t know when it was going to stop, and we were trying to bend the curve, flatten the curve, and we had to do that by our behavior, and then we came down the other side and the cases were declining so slowly, and we finally got to the other end. And so many people helped, and so much happened along the way, there was so much fear and pain and trauma. But on the other hand, there was such goodness. The people of New York did the right thing. We had 30,000 people volunteer to come in from outside New York to volunteer in our hospitals. Think about that. 30,000 people. I mean, there’s a lot of love in this country, and there’s a lot of goodness.
With this penchant for metaphoric visuals, a couple of weeks ago, the governor gave his press conference in front of a styrofoam mountain that depicts the trajectory of the virus in New York. According to Democrat & Chronicle, it was constructed by his staff at a total cost of $158.
Governor Cuomo’s visualization of the mountain seems to have come to the fore as the rest of the nation has seen surging numbers of COVID cases. “New Yorkers did the impossible. We went from the worst infection rate in the United States to the best infection rate in the United States,” he said in a statement on July 6. I like to say that we crossed the mountain… We don’t want to have the challenge of crossing a mountain range, right? One mountain was enough.”
To that end, the governor announced yesterday that all travelers coming into New York from states on the tri-state quarantine must provide their contact info at the airports or via an online portal. As of today, 22 states are on that list.
You can order a “New York Tough” poster here. They measure 22” X 28” and are $14.50. They are being sold at cost, so the state does not profit from them. The governor’s office would not reveal the name of the artist who did the poster to the Post. But they did tell the paper that in the 14 hours following Governor Cuomo’s Tweet, there were nearly 11,000 pre-orders.
