Knight Arts Challenge Detroit award winner Shara Nova.

“Stop texting and driving!” Shara Nova shouts

The My Brightest Diamond lead singer is sitting on her hotel veranda in Savannah, Georgia, and she can see a man driving past with his phone in his hand. And that, she says, is a huge annoyance. She is thinking a lot about personal freedoms, and this is not one of them.

Nova is in town for the Savannah Music Festival and will be playing in just a few hours. Then it will be on to Dallas and other cities as the Detroit-based artist passes through the festival circuit, playing material from her past four albums as well as other work she has written and composed. Each show is different and audiences never know what to expect. After all, in addition to fronting her rock band, Nova composed the baroque opera, “You Us We All” inspired by Beyonce and Bach; toured with the indie folk rock band the Decemberists; and can sing Górecki’s Third Symphony; among many, many other things.

On April 18, the multi-talented artist lands in Miami to perform at an assembly of some of the country’s most accomplished artists, all of whom, like Nova, are United States Artists fellows.

Each year USA, a Chicago-based grantmaking and advocacy group, awards $50,000 fellowships to dozens of artists – no strings attached – as a way of encouraging art and artists in America. Knight Foundation underwrites fellows who are working in cities where the Knight brothers once owned newspapers. Last year, that list included Nova as well as Frank Big Bear of Duluth, Minnesota and Jonathan Muecke and Toni Pierce-Sands and Uri Sands of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Shara Nova

Frank Big Bear

Jonathan Muecke

Toni Pierce Sands and Uri Sands

“Art is everything,” said Nova. “It is integral to human existence. The fact that  Knight Foundation does value it, is to me is so … I’m speechless. I’m in tears about the value that they have placed on art as being important to humanity and social development and richness of society.”

And Knight Foundation sees value in Nova: Not only is she a USA fellow, she also scored a $50,000 Knight Arts Challenge award last year. That combined $100,000 investment comes at an inflection point for the artist personally and creatively.

First, there was a name change. Formerly Shara Worden, she is now Shara Nova. “I had been married my entire adult life,” she says. “Now I am unmarried and I just wanted to name myself for the new era.”

That new era involves a complete reimagining of her sound, too. Because the USA fellowship can be used for anything, Nova is using it to buy herself the luxury of time to write and produce her fifth My Brightest Diamonds album without the pressure to get back out on the road and tour.

“I’m actually able to work on this record more than I’ve been able to work on any other album,” she says. “My third album, I wrote a song a day. It was so fast. For this record, I’ve started about 40 songs and I have just recently scrapped them all. I’m really changing pretty dramatically what kind of music I want to be making. It’s still me, you take yourself with you, so I needed the time to take some pretty radical shifts in my work.”

She is simultaneously using her $50,000 Knight Arts Challenge grant to stage “You Us We All” in Detroit. It debuted to rave audiences at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in November 2015 and Nova believes it can be a powerhouse in her adopted home, too.

First, though she has to find a place to produce the work. Most of the city’s arts spaces are either too large or don’t have the infrastructure needed to support a work as over the top and demanding as “You Us We All.”

“The challenge of bringing the work has shown where there is a hole in the ecosystem of the arts community in Detroit,” Nova says. “We need a small black box with theater lighting that seats 300. We are in real need of a small, versatile space that is curated and able to produce small theater works of any kind.”

“If you look at the fostering of the music scene in the ’90s in Detroit,” she adds, “the space was the thing that helped that as much as anything else. Those spaces existed and people were creating music to fill those spaces.”

Despite the obstacle, Detroit has proven to be creatively fertile for the Arkansas-born musician who went to high school in Ypsilanti, Michigan. As she writes her next album, she finds inspiration in the Motor City and its history.

“Because I’m in Detroit, I’m thinking about the intersection of punk and early, socially-conscious rap music,” Nova says. “I am thinking about the need for individual freedom and also connectedness to the collective. As we move into a diverse world, as borders are shifting and we need to have a global consciousness rather than this tribal attitude, the need to value individuality or differentness is really crucial to the new dawn. I am interested in the way that Detroit has had that conversation.”

Just be sure not to text and drive. There is, to Nova, no individual freedom to do that.