Now made up of Michael Baldwin (1945) and Mel Ramsden (1944), who still claim to be part of the collective, Art & Language was founded in the UK in 1967 on the initiative of four people. Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell met in 1966 while teaching art in Coventry.
They immediately began producing joint works and working on a magazine project, Art-Language, whose first issue was published in 1969 and which gave its name to the collective. Charles Harrison (1942-2009) and Mel Ramsden joined the group in 1970.

Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, around fifty British and American artists and critics joined Art & Language.
It was a fluctuating collective of conceptual artists that encouraged theoretical exchanges between all its members. They shared similar convictions: conceptual art was a critique of modernism as an institutionalised system.