At 95, she’s still one of the area’s most renowned sculptors. But an art career seemed like a distant dream when she was a young girl at Newton’s Rice School in the 1930s.

“In those days, you wanted to be a housewife, get married, have babies, and live in a little house with a picket fence. That’s what I thought I wanted. I always did well in art, but I never thought it was anything I could make a living at,” she recalls. 

She was wrong: An early knack for painting and dioramas flourished into a long career, and her little house with a picket fence is actually a rambling Victorian in Newton not far from where she grew up, complete with a separate sculpting studio in a converted garage. Here, she raised four children, now with children and grandchildren of their own, many of them artists in their own right. And although her husband has passed away and her kids are grown, the house is still crowded: with playful sculptures and miniatures, that is. 

In Schön’s telling, her journey was one of fortuitous meandering. After being waitlisted at Radcliffe College, she secured a place at General College, a growing institution within Boston University geared toward newly released World War II veterans. Not surprisingly, the 17-year-old didn’t fit in with the 20-something men who flooded the classrooms.

She found work at a Cambridge pottery studio; at last, she felt at home. She began to build a portfolio, gaining admission to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (now SMFA at Tufts) while taking joint classes at Tufts University. Newly married, she earned a sociology degree—and received her diploma while pregnant. Schön’s work was given a featured spot at SMFA’s graduation show.

“My piece was the head piece, and what do you think it was? A pregnant mother with a baby on her shoulders. I was very proud of that,” she recalls. 

It leveraged her real life, a trend that would continue throughout her career. After graduation, she and her husband, philosopher Donald Schön, began a nomadic existence, relocating based on his career in academia and government: Los Angeles, Kansas City, Washington, D.C., and eventually back to Boston, where he began a professorship in urban studies at MIT and she raised their children. She sculpted her life to fit her art, working with wet clay in her bedroom and teaching art classes in her basement to mothers who wanted a little “time away from their babies.” 

“I decided that adults like to do things that are different from what they do normally,” she says.

She also forged a friendship with Edna Hibel, a childhood friend of her husband. Hibel was a noted artist with a gallery on Boston’s Newbury Street, and she began to show Schön’s bronzes of children playing. As Hibel’s career expanded to the galleries of Madison Avenue in Manhattan, Schön’s did, too. 

Meanwhile, her husband’s career was also on the rise. One evening, the Schöns entertained the incoming MIT dean John de Monchaux, and his wife, Suzanne. It proved to be a life-changing dinner.

The couple were deeply involved in urban design and Great Britain’s utopian postwar New Towns Movement. Arriving in the United States, the family took their twin boys to Boston’s Public Garden. Suzanne, in particular, was interested in making cities hospitable for children—and it seemed the Garden could use some improvements.

“Their kids, even though they came from England, knew the book ‘Make Way for Ducklings.’ And they asked, ‘Mommy, where are the ducks?’ Famous lines! Suzanne came to me and said: ‘Nancy, I think you ought to do the ducks in the Boston Public Garden.’ I said: ‘You’re crazy!’” she says.

Still, she relished a challenge. Bureaucratic maneuvering ensued. While Boston officials were gradually on board, Schön ultimately had to charm “Ducklings” author Robert McCloskey.

“I was born under some kind of bright star: It turned out that a friend had a house in Maine and knew Robert McCloskey. I couldn’t believe it! So she called him and started bragging about Suzanne and me. He said, ‘When can I meet these charming women?’” she remembers. 

He planned to drive down to Boston with his wife for a visit. Schön made small wax ducklings as samples and waited at her home studio for his arrival, hoping the artist would be pleased with her interpretation.

“And he looked just like his drawings when he came into the house,” she laughs. McCloskey’s wife was impressed; the author and illustrator was reserved and asked for more prototypes, promising to return in six weeks for a verdict.

“He wanted to see what I could do. And, in six weeks, I managed to make Mrs. Mallard and two or three ducklings—we’re talking the real size,” she says.

Once again, McCloskey tromped to her studio. It was a cold October night, with snow already on the ground. He still looked skeptical and asked to move the sculptures outside, into the chill, for scale.

“Now, they were heavy, big and clay. But we managed to get them outside. Back then, there was a nursery school next to my studio, and somehow a whole bunch of kids and their parents were just going home. They saw these ducks and started sitting on them, playing with them. We all looked at each other and said, ‘Oh my God!’ And that was it. From then on, we had his copyright,” she says.

The ducklings cemented Schön’s legacy. But her career continues to flourish, and her newer, whimsical designs still enliven the city. She recently completed a bronze pathway imprinted with footprints leading to the entrance of St. Leonard Church’s in the North End. The interactive sculpture, titled Noble Journey: Italy to America, honors the Italian immigrants who arrived in the neighborhood between the 1850s and 1920s. St. Leonard’s was the first Italian church in New England, constructed in 1873.

“The idea is that people will walk on the footprints and can talk about their past, their parents and their grandparents, and then go into the church,” she says. 

Her next projects focus unabashedly on politics: a sculpture of an elephant, symbolizing the Republican Party, with a gun for a trunk; figures of the Supreme Court in hoods. 

“I’m doing nothing now but political pieces,” she says, grinning. “And I think, if I may say so, in a good way, that I’m very ambitious. I like to do things. I like to get things done.”