NEW YORK, NY.- IMAZ Foundation announces its inaugural exhibition, Chapter One, opening June 24, 2026, at The Atelier at Ideal Glass Studios, 22 E 2nd St, New York, NY 10003. The exhibition coincides with the 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted across North America, and marks the public launch of IMAZ — a new cultural platform and nonprofit that transforms the act of collecting into direct, traceable social impact.
IMAZ is not a fútbol charity. It is a cultural platform where collecting becomes participation — and where the value that accumulates around art is directed, with full transparency, toward the communities that need it most.
Chapter One brings together eleven contemporary artists — Dustin Yellin, Lucia Hierro, Jamel Robinson, Sebastian Errazuriz, Ryan Schneider, Soraya Abu Naba'a, Vincent Beaurin, Wes Aderhold, Jose Duran, Maya Makino, and Diana Rowe — each invited to reinterpret the fútbol, the most universally recognized object on earth, through their own visual language. The resulting works are presented as a silent auction, with each unique piece directly funding the construction of a home for a single mother and her children in Quito, Ecuador. The builds are carried out in partnership with CAEMBA, a ground-level organization working in the communities where the homes will stand.
For the families receiving these homes, stable housing is not a comfort. It is the condition for everything else — their children's education, their safety, their ability to work, their dignity. A house changes the trajectory of a family for generations.
Chapter One is curated by Javier Martin — Spanish multidisciplinary artist and founder of 404 Art Collection — whose practice spans the boundaries between art, culture, and institution. Set within a gallery environment that draws equally from the atmosphere of a contemporary art institution and the ritual of fútbol, the exhibition introduces a model where collecting creates consequence: where the work on the wall and the house being built are a single, unbroken act.
"Culture moves people more reliably than almost anything else on earth," said Sami Deller, Founder of IMAZ. "What we have built almost no infrastructure for is turning that movement into something lasting. IMAZ exists to change that — not by adding philanthropy to culture, but by making them the same thing."
Fútbol is where the story begins. Future chapters will move through other cultural languages — music, food, fashion, craft — each activating a different community of artists around a new human outcome. The model travels wherever culture concentrates value and meaning.
