The first show was the German artist Charlotte Posenenske; the second, the Dutch architect and design duo Slothouber and Graatsma. What set the gallery apart almost immediately was not the openings, because there were no openings to speak of — it was a magazine. Alongside the inaugural exhibition Van Beijeren and Van Ravesteijn launched the Art & Project Bulletin, a small A3 sheet folded into four A4 pages, generally printed in black ink on white paper by a print shop called Delta in The Hague, in editions of 800. Four hundred copies went out free to a mailing list of artists, galleries, and curators. The rest sat in stacks at the gallery for visitors to take. The Bulletin let artists do something that the gallery's evening-only hours could not: stage "exhibitions by mail," reaching audiences in Düsseldorf and Tokyo and Venice without anyone leaving their studio.

From May 1969 onward, the early focus on architectural research gave way to something more radical. Art & Project began showing the international wave of artists who were dematerializing the art object — Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Jan Dibbets, Gilbert & George, Douglas Huebler, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner. In March 1970, Gilbert & George came to Van Beijeren and Van Ravesteijn's gallery and repeated their famous Posing on Stairs performance, standing as living statues that they had first performed at the Stedelijk Museum a few months earlier. The Bulletin itself became, increasingly, a work of art. Bulletin 43 by Sol LeWitt, in September 1971, was folded into forty-eight rectangles. Bulletin 68 by Douglas Huebler, August 1973, came in an unusual 29.7-by-63-centimeter format folded in three. Bulletin 75 by Daniel Buren was printed on vellum. Bulletin 107 by Francesco Clemente arrived on orange paper. Some issues were printed in other cities — Bulletin 20 by Gilbert & George and Bulletin 21 by Yutaka Matsuzawa were printed and distributed from Tokyo, two pages of conceptual art arriving in mailboxes around the world like postcards from nowhere in particular.

The gallery moved twice, first in 1971 to Van Breestraat 18, near the Stedelijk Museum and across from Riekje Swart's gallery — the only other contemporary space in Amsterdam with a comparable international outlook — and again in 1973 to Willemsparkweg 36, where it stayed six years. The same year Van Beijeren and Van Ravesteijn opened a satellite called Art & Project / MTL in Antwerp, partnering with the Brussels dealer Fernand Spillemaeckers; eleven solo exhibitions ran there across 1973 and 1974. Their gallery network ran through Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, Yvonne Lambert in Paris, Sperone in Turin, Jack Wendler in London, Claire Copley in Los Angeles. Their clients were the major Dutch and Belgian collectors of the period — Edy de Wilde, who directed the Stedelijk from 1963 to 1985; Martin and Mia Visser; Herman and Nicole Daled; Anton and Annick Herbert. For a few decades the gallery's reputation helped establish Amsterdam as, in the phrase later quoted in MoMA's exhibition catalogue, "an international nexus of intense art activities."

From 1979 the gallery operated at Prinsengracht 785, in the canal district that tourists actually photograph. Then in 1989, after twenty-one years and 156 Bulletins, the magazine simply stopped. The gallery moved to Slootdorp, a remote village in the agricultural north of Holland — an extraordinary geographic retreat for a space whose entire identity had been built on international networks. There it ran until December 2001, when Art & Project closed. Geert van Beijeren died a few years later. The gallery's archive, together with the founders' personal records — ninety-two meters of paper in total — was given to the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, the Dutch national heritage organization, and opened to public access from 2014. Original Bulletins, originally given away free, are now collected as primary documents of European conceptual art.

In 2007 the founders donated a substantial part of their personal art collection to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which built an exhibition around it in 2009 called In & Out of Amsterdam — a title that captured something true about what the gallery had been. Art & Project had stood in Amsterdam-Zuid, and on the Prinsengracht, and finally in a North Holland village; but the actual exhibitions had circulated through paper, through the postal service, through the patient correspondence of a network. A symposium at Wiels in Brussels in 2010 placed the gallery alongside MTL as the two main hubs of conceptual exchange between Amsterdam and the Belgian art world. The Richard Wagnerstraat house where the whole thing began, in a quiet street of Amsterdam-Zuid, no longer holds a gallery. But for thirty years what came out of it traveled farther than most museums.