Old Simbai War Shield from Allan D Christensen Collection

An old war shield, Simbai. Provenance: Allan D Christensen collection no CC60612 Collected by Philip Goldman, Allen D. And Carmen M. Christensen founded the Christensen Fund as a private foundation in California in 1957. Allen, who was a civil and mining engineer, served as president of the Utah Mining and construction Company for many years. He was an enthusiastic and eclectic traveller and Art collector with wide intellectual interests. Beginning in the early 1970s, the Christensen Fund added to its various mostly San Francisco Bay area-based charitable and educational activities the acquisition of fine arts and ethnographic artefacts. Its first Art collection was a group of Pomo Indian baskets that are now at Harvard University's Peabody Museum. From 1972 to 1999 the fund was a private operating foundation, its operations being the collection and loan of as many as 35,000 pieces of what it then called 'Non-Western Art' to major museums for their study and exhibition in Australia, Europe and the United States. 96 x 58 cm