Kate Rafferty

Kate was a strong, opinionated woman with a sardonic sense of humor. She loved her family, art, art history, museums, historical houses, gaming, the Sims, singing, an eclectic range of music, British television shows, documentaries of all sorts, and animals, most especially her dog Archer and cats Sawyer and Ollie. She did not like snakes and frogs, and would want that noted. She cared deeply about fairness and justice and inclusion. She was kind. She was a fighter.

Kate was born in Louisville, Kentucky on March 9, 1990, and was adopted on April 24, 1990, by Corinne Rafferty and Dale Wiehoff. She spent her first four years in Brooklyn, NY, where she walked frequently in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, sang songs in Polish with her babysitter, and loved summer vacations at Fishers Island, NY with her brother Sam Wiehoff and sister Leona Hess. In 1994, she moved with her parents to Minneapolis, where she attended Lake Country School and DeLaSalle High School. Kate had a beautiful singing voice and great stage presence. She participated in school performances and spent her childhood summers at a musical theater camp called Theatre e3, first as a camper and later as an assistant art instructor.

Her passion for art took her to college at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, where she graduated in 2012 with a BA in Art History and a double minor in Visual Art and Museum Studies. She wrote her undergraduate thesis on the question of repatriation of art. She went on to graduate studies in art history at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, specializing in nineteenth-century American art and earning a master’s in 2015. Throughout college and grad school, Kate worked in museums, including Chatham University Art Gallery and the Charles Allis Art Museum, as an archivist and curatorial team member. She was very proud of the exhibition she curated in 2015 at the Charles Allis entitled American Beauty: Nineteenth-Century Landscapes. Kate also worked for a short while at the Humane Society in Milwaukee, and when she moved back to the Twin Cities in 2016 she took a job at the Animal Humane Society, where she worked in three different departments for the next seven years.

Kate was an introvert and a homebody, deeply attached to her family. She adored her brother and sister and was thrilled to be an aunt. Her house in South St. Anthony Park, which she shared with Amanda Bannister, was a constant source of pleasure. On weekends she loved taking long drives through Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge with Amanda and their three dogs. Kate also was active in several online communities, and led an all-woman team in one gaming league. (Please forgive her parents if we haven’t used the right words to describe the gaming.)

For more than half her short life, Kate endured a raft of health issues, including diabetes, high blood pressure and chronic kidney disease. She had more than her share of hospitalizations, procedures and surgeries, and was the recipient of a successful kidney transplant in 2022. Throughout, she was extremely brave, hopeful and upbeat – full of life and full of plans. In the last weeks of her life, she was looking forward to craft nights with neighbors, a newly-discovered line-dancing group, a mystery book club she had recently joined, a gaming group for women of color, and a trivia team.

Her entire life, Kate loved beauty. Wherever she went, she never took the more efficient route if she could take the more beautiful one.

Kate Rafferty is survived by her parents Corinne Rafferty and Dale Wiehoff, siblings Leona Hess and Sam Wiehoff (Kate Kile Wiehoff), niece and nephew Wilder and Lenox, grandmother Leona Wiehoff, Sam and Leona’s mother Anne Hess (Craig Kaplan), many many aunts, uncles and cousins, members of her birth family, and a wide community of friends and co-workers.

A celebration of Kate’s life will be held at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a museum she has loved since childhood, on Friday May 31 at 5PM. The service will be followed by refreshments and a time to visit. Memorial donations can be made to Friends of Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge

(Please copy and paste the below URL into your search to access the website)

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Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Main Entrance

2400 3rd Ave S

Minneapolis MN 55404

There will be signage and ushers to guide you towards the Reception Hall from the Third Avenue entrance. Free parking is available for memorial guests on the 3rd level of the parking ramp at the corner of Third Avenue and 25th Street. See map below, and use the entrance marked “3” on the map.

The museum is free to the public and open until 5 pm on Friday. The two galleries adjacent to the Reception Hall will remain open for memorial guests throughout the evening.