Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled a new poster on Monday, as his way of illustrating New York's long, arduous battle against the coronavirus.
But the artful depiction of the more than 32 thousand New York deaths from COVID-19, did not sit well with some State Senators and New Yorkers.
"I mean this with 0% snark: how is this not wildly offensive?" wrote Democratic state Sen. Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn on Twitter. "This is an artful monument to death and tragedy being sold by the state. I’m legit perplexed."
The poster references the flights of passengers from Europe bringing the virus over to New York and mixes inside jokes from what many called his "fireside chats," such as the boyfriend cliff.
But the poster did little to mention the more than 6,000 lives lost in nursing homes, the more than 407,000 coronavirus cases in the state, or the last recorded unemployment rate for the state which stood at 14.5 %.
The mountain is labeled as "111 Days in Hell," but some on Twitter said it was making light of a gruesome reality.
"I appreciate the sentiment, but the "mountain" is made of 25,000 dead bodies," wrote John O'Neil on Twitter, an Editor on Bloomberg's Quick Take team. "Please retire this trope. We should have a statewide day of mourning, not a celebration."
"Are all the people about to be evicted not represented because they're drowned under the Sea of Division?" wrote Sen.Mike Gianairis, the number two Democrat in the state Senate.
Before revealing the poster, Cuomo said working on it has helped him process what happened here in New York.
Cuomo has designed similar posters before to illustrate how he views the current political climate. Earlier this year Cuomo released a poster featuring New York depicted as a ship being tossed in a stormy sea.
Cuomo designed that poster himself, paying for it with campaign funds. A Brooklyn-based artist made the final version based on an outline of what Cuomo drew.
That artist, Rusty Zimmerman, said Monday he did not make the latest poster.
"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," Cuomo said.
"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."