These masks all were brought to the United States by a group of dancers from the island of Java in Indonesia, who performed at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. The dancers were part of the Javanese Village section of the Exposition, organized and financed by the colonial government of the Netherland's East Indies, as Indonesia was called in those days. 120 dancers, musicians and ordinary rural people from West and Central Java spent about nine months in Chicago. The Javanese Village (there were also villages of Northwest Coast Indians, Germans, Japanese and many others) was one of the most popular attractions at the Exposition. Reportedly, Chicago was equally popular with the Javanese village people, who had a good time and talked about their experience for many years after returning to Java.