Drive into West Palm Beach from the south on Dixie Highway this week and you will pass something new: two oversized steel petals, one yellow and one blue, sitting beside the Stub Canal as if they had just landed there. The work is called Petals of the Moon, it is by the London artist Sinta Tantra, and the City of West Palm Beach announced on Oct. 14 that it is installed at The Sound, 8111 S. Dixie Highway, where it marks the city's southern gateway.

What you are looking at

Petals of the Moon is two organic forms fabricated in steel. The trick is in what you cannot see: each piece is anchored to a reinforced concrete foundation buried below grade, so from the sidewalk the shapes appear to rest on the ground and balance there, with nothing holding them up. The pair runs parallel to the canal, which is the point. According to the city's announcement, Tantra built the piece around two things that shaped this end of town long before the apartment towers: the waterways, and pineapples. She frames the work as a link between earth, sky and water, which is why the moon is in the title and the canal is in the siting.

The commission came through Art in Public Places, the city's public art program, as a public-private partnership with Woodfield-Flagler Venture, the development team behind The Sound. The city says a public commemoration will follow in December, timed to the building's grand opening.

Yes, pineapples

The pineapple reference is not decoration. In the late 1800s, the lagoon shore south of downtown West Palm Beach, where the El Cid neighborhood sits now, was farm country, and the crop was pineapple. The state's historical marker for the El Cid neighborhood records that pioneer Benjamin Lanehart homesteaded there in 1876 and started the area's first commercial pineapple operation, and that pineapples came to dominate local agriculture. By the turn of the century, competition and plant disease had wiped the business out, and in 1921 John Phipps assembled the old pineapple fields into the Mediterranean Revival neighborhood that El Cid residents walk today.

So a sculpture that nods to pineapples, placed on the South End's main road a few miles down Dixie from El Cid, is a small history lesson hiding in plain sight. Most people who pass it will not know that this side of town once grew fruit. Now there is a reason to ask.

Who Sinta Tantra is

Tantra is a big get for a neighborhood gateway. Born in New York in 1979, she is a British artist of Balinese descent who trained at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London and graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2006. She calls herself a painter who works at the scale of architecture, and her signature is bright, abstract geometry: circles, arcs, celestial shapes and confident color.

Her own biography lists work in the UK Government Art Collection, the Benetton Foundation collection, Museum MACAN in Jakarta and the Louis Vuitton collection, and shows at the Liverpool Biennial, the Folkestone Triennial, the Karachi Biennale and London's Saatchi Gallery. She also has a local connection: she is represented by Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, which runs spaces in London, Berlin and at 2414 Florida Ave. in West Palm Beach.

The building behind it

The Sound is the new apartment building the sculptures front, and it is already welcoming residents. Its own site lists studios through three-bedroom homes, workforce housing units, a full pickleball center, spin and yoga studios, a resort-style pool and a penthouse sky lounge with billiards and views toward Palm Beach. The leasing office is at 520 Gregory Road.

The detail South End neighbors will care about most is on the ground floor. The Sound advertises an on-site Trader Joe's, and the grocer's store locator now lists its West Palm Beach location at 8111 S. Dixie Highway. For people who live nearby, that is a practical change, and the sculptures will be the landmark you give friends for finding it.

How to see it, and hear the artist

The work sits outdoors and is free to see at any hour. Go in the late afternoon, when low sun hits the steel and the colors read strongest against the water. If you want the backstory on site, the city's Art in Public Places program publishes a free digital guide on the Bloomberg Connects app, in English and Spanish, and the city says it includes audio commentary from Tantra herself.

West Palm Beach has spent the last few years putting serious art in ordinary places, from downtown plazas to neighborhood corners. Petals of the Moon pushes that idea to the city line, so the first thing you meet coming up Dixie Highway from Lake Worth Beach is not a billboard or a traffic signal but a piece of art with a story about who farmed here first. The December dedication will make it official. You do not have to wait for it.