Louisiana's new 'I Voted' sticker features a trumpet and a state flower

Louisiana voters casting ballots in Tuesday's election will affix a new sticker to their clothing. The image, created by 52-year-old Terrance Osborne, depicts a trumpet releasing a flow of color. It is not a simple logo. It is a specific visual argument about state identity that the artist spent time refining.

The central motif is a trumpet. Osborne says the idea originated with his mentor, Richard Thomas, who ran an art gallery called Visual Jazz. Thomas believed in the power of jazz to communicate. Osborne wanted to visualize that sound as it exited the instrument's bell. He did not paint musical notes. He painted a bouquet of color.

The sticker balances symbols of the entire state with a nod to its most famous city. The state provided the brief: make it about Louisiana. They allowed for a Mardi Gras influence. Osborne added flowers to represent the state, including the magnolia. He then added a string of gold, purple, and green beads moving toward the southeast corner of the sticker. New Orleans is located in the southeast part of the state. Osborne says the bead placement was a deliberate response to a comment from Governor Landry suggesting the city was not special. The artist wanted the sticker to assert the opposite.

The color palette is strictly limited. Osborne worked with eight specific colors on this piece. He developed that palette in a painting class at Xavier University under instructor Ron Bechet. Bechet taught him to build paintings from dark values to light. That discipline ended the random color choices Osborne used earlier in his career. Every hue on the voting sticker comes from that refined set of eight.

Osborne initially planned to offer an autographed print to anyone who showed him their sticker during early voting. He posted the offer on Instagram. State officials called him to stop. They ruled that a private citizen could not give something of value in exchange for the sticker, even though the state itself was giving a sticker as an incentive for voting. Osborne said the logic seemed strange to him. He updated his social media post to explain the rule change to his followers.

The artist did not include his wife Stephanie's initials in the design. He usually adds them to a third or half of his paintings. He found it difficult to place the letters in this specific composition. He left them out rather than clutter the image.

Osborne credits his civic engagement to Richard Thomas. Thomas advocated for making voices heard and fighting for the arts. Osborne grew up in the Tremé and 7th Ward neighborhoods. He worked with Thomas on murals, including a group project under the Claiborne bridge. That work came after Osborne started collaborating with Thomas in 1991. Osborne's first mural was at Hunter's Field, where he painted figures breaking through a brick wall. He was 16 or 17 years old when he sold his first painting through Thomas's afterschool program, Pieces of Power.

Osborne has operated the Terrance Osborne Gallery on Magazine Street since 2017. He graduated from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and Xavier University of Louisiana. Before Hurricane Katrina, he taught art at Alice Harte Elementary in the Algiers neighborhood.