In 1972, the Christensen Fund began to focus its support on the visual arts and bought its first art collection, a group of Pomo Indian baskets now at Harvard University's Peabody Museum.

The diverse and rapidly expanding collections were primarily from the geographic regions of Africa and the Pacific Rim - Australia, Oceania, Melanesia and South, Southeast and East Asia. By Allen Christensen's death in 1989, the Christensen Fund owned approximately 35,000 objects, most of these on loan at various museums in the United States and Australia. Between 1991 and 2001 the Fund donated all of its collections to the following museums and institutions:

The Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
Asian ceramics, lacquers, paintings, arms and armor.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Contemporary Australian paintings.

Art Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Melanesian tribal pieces; Australian Aboriginal tribal objects (about 4,000 pieces).

Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
Contemporary Australian paintings.

The Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA
Kuba textiles collection.

The Honolulu Academy of Arts
Indian and Asian sculptures; Indian, Southeast Asian, Melanesian and Indonesian textiles.

Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University
African and Oceanic tribal collections, Indonesian textiles.

LaTrobe University, Melbourne
African artifacts, including Coptic crosses.

The Museum of Victoria, Melbourne
African, Melanesian and Oceanic ethnographic collections.

The Seattle Art Museum
Kuba collection of sculpture and textiles; Japanese folk textiles.

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City
Indian, Indonesian and Asian sculpture collections.

The Government of Mexico
Pre-Columbian collection (repatriation of architectural and ceramic pieces).

Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia
Contemporary Australian paintings.

The Huntington Library , Pasadena
The Library of Sir Richard Burton, 19th Century British Explorer and Scholar.